The Iron Age and the Viking Age

In the Iron Age and the Viking Age people built in wood, clay and turf. Nothing stands above ground, but archaeology reveals longhouses, chieftains’ halls and cult buildings.

The ordinary house was the longhouse, with two rows of internal posts carrying the roof and walls of wattle daubed with clay, or of planks. People and animals could live under the same roof, at either end. A house stood for a generation or two, until the posts had rotted and a new house was built alongside.

Chieftains built halls for feasts, councils and cult. At Gamla Uppsala and at Uppåkra in Skåne archaeologists have found traces of unusually large and costly buildings, and Uppåkra’s small cult house was rebuilt on the same spot for several hundred years. What we know of the buildings comes from postholes, layers of burning and finds in the ground.

Christianity brought churches, at first of wood. The oldest surviving architecture in Sweden is therefore the stone churches of the Middle Ages.