Station: [35] Settlement and House Building during the Neolithic Period

Growing grain and other crops meant that our ancestors had to settle in one place for a lengthy period of time. To grow crops, they had to clear the land, lay out fields, plough them, sow the seed and – if necessary – clear weeds and exclude food competitors.

Trees were felled using stone axes. Tree trunks obtained in this way were crucially important building material for houses. The earliest people to settle permanently in Franconia are known as the Bandkeramiker – the linear pottery culture – from the decorative patterns on their pottery. They preferred to settle on very fertile loess or black earth soils and built very impressive longhouses. Each longhouse accommodated an extended family or clan under one roof, often including their domestic animals.

The houses had multiple aisles and were subdivided into different areas of use. The basic framework was built of thick oak posts sunk deep into the ground. It was topped with a roof truss and covered with straw, reeds, tree bark or other available materials. Thinner wooden poles were placed between the supporting beams and tightly interwoven with flexible withies. Then clay, or daub, could be applied to both sides and spread across the wickerwork. Provided the roof and walls were regularly maintained, longhouses had a lifespan of 20 to 30 years. Large-scale excavations have discovered villages with more than 20 such houses.

In especially fertile areas, several villages might develop, often almost concurrently and within just few kilometres of each other. That indicates a relatively high settlement density. The occasional presence of fortifications, with palisades and ditches to protect the villages from incursions, suggest that tensions sometimes arose. Evidence of one such fortified settlement from the late Neolithic period was found on a spur near the small town of Thalmässing.

There were no fundamental changes to house-building methods during the Neolithic period. However, the footprint of the buildings shrank almost continuously over the centuries.