LACK OF COMPARABLE FINDS IN FRANCE
AND IN THE SOUTH OF GERMANY
The great shortcoming of our present knowledge of
early medieval house construction in transalpine Europe
is that it is based on the results of excavations confined to
the Scandinavian countries and to the northern parts of
Holland and Germany, with the recent addition of Anglo-Saxon
England. France, to this day, has remained a terra
incognita. Bursting with treasures of unsurpassable beauty
created in more advanced and more sophisticated periods
as well as in more permanent materials, she is unlikely
to engage in the near future in any concerted search
for the shadows that the rotting timbers of her humbler
early medieval houses left in the subsoil underneath the
stately structures that replaced them. But even in southern
Germany the soil has as yet been rather unyielding. An
excavation of a Frankish settlement of the sixth to ninth
centuries A.D., made as early as 1937 in Gladbach (district
of Neuwied),[159]
brought to light a great variety of smaller
subsidiary structures, all in post-and-wattle work—but no
houses of any primary significance. The same holds true
for an Alamannic settlement of the Early Middle Ages,
excavated in 1947 in the vicinity of Merdingen (district of
Freiburg),[160]
and for a Bajuvarian early medieval village
near Burgheim (district Neuburg on the Donau.)[161]
The reason for this scarcity of finds on the mainland is
probably very simple. The dwelling mounds of the coastal
lowlands which yielded such rich information are not only
conspicuous scenic landmarks, but also of a physical
composition (marsh, clay, manure—sealed off by intermittent
layers of silt) that offers unusually favorable conditions
for the preservation of wood, an advantage that is
otherwise only encountered in peat bogs or in sites that lie
below the normal water level. On the mainland these
conditions, in general, are wanting.[162]
