Ehrenstein - Building a Stone Age house

In March 2020, Arc-Tech built a model of a Stone Age house in the Blau valley in Southern Germany. Around 6.000 years ago the site was inhabited by people of the Schussenried culture. They stayed in a village with probably more than 40 houses for around 100 years, the settlement burned down thrice in this time and was then abandoned. Thus the wooden structures were very well preserved and provided a good insight into Neolithic timbering skills.
Like in ancient times, we used mostly ash wood for all wooden structures and worked - of course - with modern tools. The roof was thatched with larch shingles, because there is no evidence of the Stone Age roofing material. One side wall is built in 3 different ways in order to show visitors the archaic construction techniques.
Thanks to Verein Steinzeitdorf Ehrenstein e.V. www.steinzeitd..., especially Mrs. Specker, the municipality of Blaustein, especially mayor Kayser, Mrs. Amann-Edelkott and Mr. Stübler for supporting us with material, good humour and enthusiasm, Mrs. Nelles for the very tasty apple pie :-), Mr. Wehrberger from Museum Ulm and Mr. Wiedmann for scientific advice and last but not least Landfrauen Blaustein for hundreds of meters of hand made hemp rope!

[@ulfr23]

Sorry, unintentionally I deleted 3 comments. One question was: "How did you connect rafters and purlins?" Answer: With 12 x 220 steel screws :-) In fact we secured every joint in that building with modern material such as screws and nails, because we don´t want to get in trouble with the legal board of construction, as the house is accessible for the public, and German law is very strict. In other house models which we erected without using metal screws the rafters were tied together at the tips, hung over the ridge purlin in position and then tied to the inferior purlins. This works very good. To avoid making the house a "knot-grave", because making ropes from bast or other such materials is hard work, sometimes it´s very useful to use just the gravitation and elaborated connections istead of wasting kilometers of rope.