Archaeological prospection of a specialized cooking-pit site at Lunde in Vestfold, Norway

Abstract

In September 2010, an exceptionally large cooking-pit site was discovered by means of geophysical prospection at Lunde in Vestfold County, Norway. The site contains in excess of 1000 cooking-pits and is, to date, one of the largest of its kind discovered in Scandinavia. Features known as cooking-pits are ubiquitous on Northern European archaeological sites. Despite research spanning decades, however, the true function and role of this rather non-descript feature type is still debated. Using the results from geophysical prospection, soil analysis, ground-truthing and excavation, this article aims to better understand this phenomenon by evaluating the physical properties revealed from the data, and setting this exceptional site in a wider cultural-historical context. The wider, landscape context is accessible from the large-scale, high-resolution, landscape archaeological prospection case-study approach conducted by Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI ArchPro). The results suggest that the multi-method approach is essential in such cases, as it is able to challenge the assumptions of the blanket interpretations often applied, and put the site in a cultural and environmental context.