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EINSWARDEN, GERMANY

The operations at Hodorf had barely been completed, when
in the winter of 1937/38 Haarnagel was called to a site in
the vicinity of the village of Einswarden,[129] on the left bank
of the estuary of the Weser river, where the heavy machinery
of a modern land improvement project had edged into the
core of an ancient dwelling mound. Systematic excavations
were undertaken in the summer of 1938 but remained confined
to only a small sector of this large mound.

They brought to light three post-and-wattle houses of
the period around the birth of Christ and below these
dwellings, in an even earlier settlement horizon which
reached back to the second and third centuries B.C., four
additional houses of the same type. The largest of the
upper settlement measured 56 feet by 21 feet (17 m. ×
6·5 m.); the smallest, 33 feet by 16 feet (10 m. × 5 m.).
The latter, having its wood work practically intact to a
height of 16 inches (40 cm.), was especially well preserved.
Haarnagel could observe that the outer posts of house II
leaned inward. He assumed that the posts that he found
were the lower portions of rafters that rose from the ground
directly, and reconstructed the house accordingly.[130] Albert
Genrich[131] and Zippelius[132] consider it more likely that these
oblique outer posts were short, that they carried an outer
frame of horizontal poles that served as footing for the
rafters, and leaned inward in order to counteract the outward
thrust of the roof, as shown in figure 309 B.