BÄRHORST, NEAR NAUEN, GERMANY
To the successful excavation work by van Giffen and
Haarnagel in the coastlands of Holland and northwestern
Germany, one has to add the work of others. As early as
1935-37 Otto Doppelfeld had unearthed a palisaded village
of an estimated fifty aisled houses, on the Bärhorst,[140]
a
shallow, sandy plateau in a marshy swale near Nauen
(Berlin). The site had been discovered in the course of
trenching operations undertaken before the installation of
a giant sewage disposal plant. Remnants of pottery and
other cultural accessories showed that the village was
constructed around A.D. 250 and that it was held in occupancy
for about a century. Since it lay in an environment
that was utterly unsuited for successful agricultural exploitation
and perished in a fire that seems to have been
associated with a planned and systematic abandonment (no
objects of any use were left), Doppelfeld concluded that it
might have been the temporary site of a wandering Germanic
tribe who discarded the site when they found prospects
for the conquest of more suitable land. While basically
adhering to the same construction type, the Bärhorst houses
showed a great variability in the treatment of their walls
(fig. 318). Some of the houses had simple wattle walls; in
others the walls were formed by boards mounted horizontally
or vertically between the wall posts. Still others
were braided from thin split pieces of straight wood (leftovers
from the hewing of the structural timbers). The
Bärhorst village showed that the aisled pre-medieval timber
house extended into the third and fourth century A.D. eastward
as far as the longitude of the modern city of Berlin.
