FOCHTELOO, RHEE, SLEEN, AND LEENS,
THE NETHERLANDS
Bloemen's excavation was followed with the discovery by
van Giffen in 1935, 1936, and 1937 of a group of settlements
of the first and second centuries A.D. near the
villages of Fochteloo, Rhee, and Sleen; and in 1938, again
near Fochteloo,[123]
of a settlement of the same period which
van Giffen believed to be the farm and residence of a
chieftain (figs. 303-304). This settlement comprised a long
house, protected by fence and ditch, and a nearby hamlet,
likewise fenced in, consisting of three smaller houses and
a couple of open barns. All of these houses were aisled and
were entered broadside by two entrances lying opposite
one another in the middle of the long walls and giving access
to a median crosswalk that separated the stables for the cattle
from the living quarters of the people. The long house of
the chieftain had a third additional entrance at the rear of
the stables, primarily for the use of livestock. This house
was 70 feet long and 21 feet wide (21·40 m. × 6·50 m.).
The great significance of van Giffen's excavations of
Ezinge was that they solved an enigma that had puzzled
students of European house construction for over a century.
They brought to light the prehistoric prototypes of two well-known
and closely related modern house types, namely
that of the Lower Saxon "Wohnstallhaus" and of the
Frisian "los-hus." The oldest surviving specimens of these
two widespread house types date from the early sixteenth
or, at the most, from the end of the fifteenth century.[124]
Van Giffen's excavations demonstrated that this type
was infinitely older than anybody had heretofore presumed
it to be, and their immediate prototypes could now be
traced back as far as the fourth century B.C. It was clearly
only a matter of time for the connecting medieval links to
be found. Once more it fell to van Giffen to lead the way
in this search. A trial ditch run through a Warf in the
vicinity of the village of Leens (Groningen), Holland,
revealed the profiles of a settlement whose life span started
approximately at the point where that of Ezinge ended.
And in a systematic excavation of this Warf conducted in
the subsequent year, van Giffen[125]
could trace his aisled
Iron Age house through seven successive layers from the
end of the seventh century A.D. to the beginning of the
eleventh. Altogether some twenty-three houses came to
light: some of them built with wattle walls, others with
walls of turves; but all of them had their roofs supported by
two rows of freestanding inner posts. I reproduce as a
typical example the plan of a house of Layer B (fig. 305),
after van Giffen, and a cross section of this house (fig. 306),
as suggested by Zippelius.[126]
