Holmegaard Bog

Facts

Ice Age workshop

By Anders Fischer, Arkæolog, Ph. D. (11 stories)

The Holmegaard Bog contains Denmark's largest concentration of well-preserved settlements from the Upper Palaeolithic period. Just beyond the Holmegård Glassworks, finds have been made of some of the world's oldest and best-preserved bows and arrows from circa 7000 BC. Excavations at the same site have unearthed hut floors made of latticed bark and countless middens of animal and fish bones and hazelnut shells. To the west of the Glassworks, Trollesgave was the site of a small 'workshop' from the end of the last ice age (circa 11000 BC), where a master craftsman had trained a couple of apprentices in one of the basic crafts of the period: the manufacture of flint tools.

Partly a public place

Selected entry

Today we were digging in heaps of nutshells" "

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Story written by Anders Fischer

Time / Periode -11000 -7000

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Thick layers of hazelnut shells are characteristic of several of the bog's well-preserved Mesolithic settlements. So when in the 1940s a workman told a local amateur archaeologist that they had been digging in heaps of nutshells instead of peat, the National Museum of Denmark was called in immediately. A few days later, an archaeological dig in the peat pit was underway. Three metres down, in the water-logged peat layers, were traces of repeated hut settlements, workshops for flint cutting, middens and discarded tools made of wood, bone and antler. Neither before nor since has such an impressive level of preservation been seen from such an early period in the North-West European Stone Age.