LimensgårdHouses from the Early, Middle and Late Neolithic on Bornholmaf Poul Otto Nielsen & Finn Ole Sonne Nielsen

At the end of the 19th century, only a few coastal settlements were known of: Grønnebæk, Hammeren, and Frennemark. Vedel’s considerations in relation to how people lived in ‘the later part of the Stone Age’, however, went beyond what could be concluded from the remains and finds from these settlements. He regarded the large stone burials as evidence that the Stone Age people were determined builders, not only when it came to the construction of burial monuments, but also their own dwellings. N.F.B. Sehested’s experiments using flint tools had shown that these could have been effectively used in the construction of timber structures in the Neolithic period. But many years passed before archaeological excavations confirmed that during the Neolithic there was a house-building tradition that corresponded with Vedel’s ideas. In general, archaeologists’ knowledge of Neolithic settlement only developed slowly throughout the 20th century, and still remains incomplete. A step towards increasing this knowledge was taken with the excavation of the settlement at Limensgård, in the south of Bornholm, which is the subject of this book.