In 1933 Walenty Szwajcer, a local teacher on a trip to Lake Biskupin in Poland, noticed timbers in the lake. The following year Professor Józef Kostrzewski began a series of excavations that uncovered a large Iron Age settlement built of timber preserved in marshland at the edge of the lake. As more of the site was revealed, it became apparent that the scale of the find and its exceptional preservation made this one the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. The Poles were naturally pretty chuffed, and, sandwiched between Hitler and Stalin, they hadn’t got much else to be chuffed about in the late 1930s.
The settlement took the form of a large artificial Island surrounded by 450m of timber ramparts enclosing about 100 identical houses, laid out on a strict grid pattern separated by timber streets. The whole structure was very regular and built from standardised components. It dated to the Hallstatt period, but belonged to a northerly contemporary, the Lusatian culture, which is evident in the area immediately south of the Baltic, particularly in Poland. Modern dendrochronology dates the felling of many of the oak trees used at Biskupin to the winter of 738/737 BC. (Radiocarbon dating in the 1980s had placed the site up to a century earlier, which, not for the first time, was the cause of some confusion.)
The houses measured about 8 x 10m and were ‘log-built’ from pine, with oak used for important structural components. Each house had two main rooms, with a hearth in the largest. The rows of houses were separated by eleven 3m wide timber streets, which linked to an outer road running between the houses and the timber rampart.
As the excavation progressed, this extraordinary site became a cause for national pride among Poles, a culture so often dominated by its neighbours. To the Poles the site was a symbolic of nationhood and identity, and was testament to the achievements of ancient Polish or Slavic culture.
However, as in all good archaeology plots, in 1939 the dastardly Nazis turned up, and they had own very different ideas about culture, and just who had been responsible for any prehistoric achievements in northern Europe.
Read more, with illustrations at
http://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/16-world-of-woos.html
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road