Right now The Baltic Pipeline is eating its way through the ancient soil of Denmark, so it can feed the rest of Europe with cheap gas from Russia. There are many opinions about this project which I will not dive into, but one of the consequences from all the digging is that new archeological findings dating back thousands of years are being found at several excavations.
In 2020, there were discovered 14 locations on the island of Funen in Denmark. The oldest find so far is an iron extraction site that dates back at least 2000 years, and less than a kilometer east from the site, they discovered the remains of an Iron Age settlement.
At the settlement, they found a longhouse, but there are only a few traces are leftover in the landscape. However, this is another example that longhouses were not just something that was built during the Viking Age, but they were also built in the early Iron Age.
According to the archeologists, the longhouse was about 17 meters long, and 6 meters wide, and it had plenty of room for a big family with all their animals.
Small discoveries like this may not sound that interesting, but they help us piece together our history, so can understand where we came from. I often look at it as a big unsolved puzzle, with many missing pieces. Besides this excavation at Årslev, there is another interesting area, where there have been found many objects in the past.
In 2020, in the small village of Viby, the archaeologists discovered the remains of a comb made from animal bones. This comb has been dated to the Viking Age, and there are some speculations that this was placed in a Viking grave. This could indicate that there is a Viking graveyard in the area.
All of the excavations are as of right now finished, and the thousands of objects are in the process of being registered. But I think they will return to some of the interesting places in the future, and I think that Viby will be one of them.
