Here at McDonald’s in Sandnes (West-Norway; near Stavanger) we are saying our last farewell to what we consider to be the most far out civilisation. Most mournfully we are eating our hamburgers, with the thought in our heads that it may be quite a while beg\fore we have a decent meal again. We are mentally preparing ourselves to leave our element and find out about the one our ancestors considered quite ordinary hundreds of years ago. We finished. Now we are off to Forsand.

Forsand has an unbroken history of settlement covering a period of nearly 2000 years, from 1500 B.C to æ500 A. D. For half of this period the settlement was organised like a village, with strong social and economic ties between the farms. In the Bronze Age people learned how to fertilize their fields so as a result the settlement could remain in existence for centuries. This led to their being able to invest in big, well-built houses.

Here is the group outside the Bronze Age house where we spent the night. From left to right:

Øystein, Eivind, Elvedin, Simen, Katrine, Jan Erik, Kenneth og Stig.
Here you can see the smithy. They made pottery, swords, etc. here
Here is the picture of the guildhall, but it is impossible to see the whole building because it is 31 metres long. King Harald V of Norway recently visited Forsand. For the occasion he was served food prepared in the method of the time, with a cooking pit big enough to take 20 large legs of lam. From time immemorial the guildhall was used in a variety of ways as a meeting place for those who lived in the surroundings. It could have been a kind of banqueting hall where they could gather for celebrations.
This picture shows Simen using the old-fashioned method of butter-making. Among other ingredients in the churn are cream and salt. It was a time-consuming, not to say quite tiring job, therefore we did this after tour! Eventually, we were lucky enough to taste the world’s best butter
Baking bread. This is the kind oven people used to bake bread in the Iron Age. First s, the oven had to be pre-heated before we could begin baking. In the meantime we rolled out the loaves. The oven is made of clay.
We had our own lamb roasted in the genuine Iron Age style, here in a little cooking pit in the smithy. The meat was placed snugly in the pit and cooked under hot stones with layers of turf on the top. It was actually very effective; the meat was good and cooked all the way through. The picture shows the meat being taken out of the pit.
This is a cooking pit. This worked as a very efficient oven. They heated the whole pit, then wrapped the meat in leaves and animal skins before laying it in a mass of big hot stones. This in turn were covered in turf “mats”. The meat was the left to cook for an hour. This is most effective way of cooking meat. The meat we ate was also cooked in this fashion. This is an extremely large pit and is the one used on the King’s visit.
A picture of a ”grasgarden”. The Old Norwegian word “gras” corresponds to the modern botanical term “herb”, namely a non-refined plant, like a weed. In Snorre’s account of Ragnhild’s dream about the fate of her son, it says that she was standing in a “grasgarden”. The grasgarden or herbgarden, is an enclosure with vegetation and useful plants known from pre-historic times. Many are still used today, while others are found in wildflower flora. The oldest enclosures we know of in Norway are “laukrgardr” (onion “patch”) and “kvanngardr” (angelica “patch”). They are known from the oldest statutes where regulations were laid down for these enclosures. The plants in them must have been very vital for Iron Age man because there were strong penalties for anyone found stealing them.
On our first evening we ate Iron Age broth. This is a kind of soup. It contained leg of a lamb, onion, carrots and herbs from the “grasgarden”. The leg of lamb was roasted in the cooking pit then cutup and mixed with the boiled vegetables to make a soup.
One of the first things we noticed in the Iron Age house was the all-embracing darkness. Only the open fire gave any beam of light and was the natural meeting place. Late in the evening, while sitting round the fire, we talked about the ways Iron Age people might have entertained themselves. The dark was, of course, a central topic of conversation, then as now, and in that era they knew very little about natural phenomena and the like. Therefore, the dark was sinister and creepy. Anything could be lurking out of the dark, so they conjured up a lot of weird creatures in their minds. An unexpected sound, an unrecognised bird call, such things could be a furious god from the bowels of the earth. Fantasy blossomed in the Iron Age and paved the way for a wild and strong mythology. If we had been living at that time, we felt that we would have been scared stiff if the sound of an insect had taken us by surprise and, maybe would have believe it was a bloodthirsty monster.
Yees…. Here we are at the breakfast table next morning, tired and stinking of smoke. We had not slept well and were hungry after the rather Spartan meal we had the night before. It was some consolation that we had a decent breakfast with bread and various things to put on it, which were not anything like as old as rest of the Landa….also, it wasn’t murky in here and it smelt fresh and clean!
Pottery has been a part of the Landa Ancient Village for a long time, right from the oldest settlements. To heat water they needed vessels to put the water in, and pots and ceramic articles had other uses too. The design and decoration of the pots was not primitive. They had developed designs which are difficult to produce even today. They had also developed equipment used to make these articles, as well as ceramic techniques. When they were going to make pots they went to fetch clay which was found near by. They were able to create wonderful works of art from clay. While we were at the village we also made such pots, one of which you see pictured here.
Even ”genuine” Iron Age Man got tired of eating broth with herbs and bread tasting of sand sometimes. So, as soon as we returned to “civilisation” we made a bee line for McDonald’s to relieve our hunger pangs and to indulge ourselves in our modern, urban needs. It tasted GREAT!

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