1154 Ancient Holes At Løykja Reveal Something Extraordinary – Archaeologists Say

Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - When archaeologists started to investigate the ancient holes at Løykja in Norway, they were not particularly excited, but then they suddenly found evidence of something unusual taking place at the site. This was no ordinary place, and we still can’t explain why our ancestors gathered at this site in large numbers.

Archaeologists find cooking pits often. Cooking pits are the ovens of the past. They worked by lighting a fire in a pit that contained rocks. When the fire burned down to a smolder, meat and fish were put into the pit and covered, and the food was slow-cooked by the hot stones.

Cooking pits are one of the most common structures found during archaeological investigations. They are useful because by taking different samples from them, they can tell us something about when and how an area has been used.

But coming across cooking pits doesn't exactly bring on that Indiana Jones big-discovery feeling for an archaeologist. Some archaeologists might even go so far as to say that cooking pits are pretty boring.

However, on the night of 7 August 2018 that Caroline Fredriksen and Arne Anderson Stamnes, both archaeologists at the NTNU University Museum discovered there was something very special about Løykja, in Sunndal municipality.

Metal-detector users had been submitting objects from the farmland here for several years. This led the county municipal archaeologists to take a closer look at the area. They found both cooking pits and an intact tomb, but hadn't come up with a clear picture of what went on at Løykja—and to what extent. That's what Caroline and Arne were trying to figure out this particular August night.

Using Ground-penetrating radar (GPR), the two researchers constructed an X-ray map of what lies two to three meters below the ground.

While studying the area, they discovered the image showed the remains of longhouses and burial tombs appearing on the screen. Not to mention cooking pits—hundreds of them!

"We immediately realized that this was something out of the ordinary. In the end, we counted a total of 1154 pits. It's pretty extraordinary!" said Fredriksen.

Was Løykja A Ritual Gathering Place?

The insane number of cooking pits tells us that once upon a time a lot of people gathered at Løykja.

Probably they came here for special occasions because pit cooking on this scale wasn't anything people would launch into following a regular workday.

The metal-detector findings indicate that the greatest amount of activity in the area took place from Roman to Merovingian times, from approximately year 0 to 750 CE. It is very common to find cooking pits in settlements from this period, but the archaeologists have so far only found the remains of two houses on the site. Then the question becomes: What did people do here—besides cook food?

"It's difficult to say for sure what went on here, but places with such a high concentration of cooking pits—and relatively few settlement traces—are often interpreted to be some form of ritual gathering place," says Fredriksen.

Buckle from Roman times, found by metal-detector user Steffen Hansen. Credit: Caroline Fredriksen, NTNU University Museum

"The name Løykja—from the Old Norse Leikr—also indicates that the site was an important social gathering place, perhaps in combination with trade or ritual activities. This seems likely, especially when viewed in the context of a large burial ground 200 meters southeast of the cooking pit area," Fredriksen says.

In cooperation with metal-detector users, archaeologists could conduct a systematic search of the entire area.

Everything from tweezers and spinning wheels to weights and hacksilver (currency) was found on the cooking pit site. The bulk of the artifacts stemmed from Roman times up to and including the Merovingian period.

"Among other things, we've found buckles from several different periods, which is a typical burial material, as well as hacksilver and production waste," says Fredriksen.

The objects do not give us the full answer to what exactly brought so many people to Løykja, but they do tell us that it was an area packed with human activity over a long period.

Written by Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com Staff Writer