34. The Curious Case of the Lengyel Longhouses

There are some things that are just wrong, and Lengyel longhouses transcend odd, through strange, into weird; buildings should not taper. Well, not at 7°, they shouldn’t. It's just not a right and proper thing for them to do. At least two sides should be parallel, otherwise your roof will be in some way irregular. It is all very worrying for a structural archaeologist. So why would Neolithic builders, like those who created this example from Biskupin, Poland [left], [1] make a building with such an unusual shape?

17. Not Seeing the Wood or the Trees

Prehistoric material culture was mostly made of wood, yet most archaeologists largely have studied the inorganic aspects of culture, since timber so rarely survives. However, it is still important to consider where the wood that we didn't find came from.

16. Biskupin; A World of Wood Stolen by the Nazis

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.

A plan of the settlement at Biskupin