Linear Pottery Longhouse

The Linear Pottery culture, known by the German abbreviation LBK (Linearbandkeramik), was the culture of the first farming communities across much of central Europe. It probably originated north of the Hungarian Plain and spread west as far as the Netherlands. Its most distinctive building is the longhouse: a rectangular timber house, often tens of metres long, of remarkably consistent design across a vast area.

Plan and frame

Most of what is known comes from ground plans of post holes. W. Startin's 1978 study of LBK house reconstruction, following Modderman's classification of Dutch houses, described the standard plan:

• Five rows of posts run the length of the house. Rows 1 and 5 are the outer wall posts; rows 2, 3 and 4 inside carried the roof.
• Three parts: houses may be single, two-part or three-part. The end sections were more heavily built than the centre.
• Y-shaped post groups often appear among the inner posts of the central section in earlier houses.

Widths were typically 5.5-7 m (18-23 ft). Lengths varied; a house at Bylany in the Czech Republic was 45 m (148 ft) long.

Walls and roof

Outer walls were of wattle and daub, sometimes alternating with split logs, with oak preferred for the massive wall posts. The roof was pitched and thatched, carried by the internal rows of posts. Extra posts at one end of some houses may indicate a partial upper floor. Houses are thought to have had one doorway at one end and no windows, with one or two internal partitions. Long pits beside the outer walls, especially at the closed end, probably collected waste and rainwater.

Lifespan and households

Some houses stood for as long as 30 years. They required too much labour for a single small family, and archaeologists debate whether each housed an extended family or a larger group. At Vráble in Slovakia about 70 longhouses stood at the same time around 5100 BCE.

Experimental reconstructions

Because only post holes survive, roof pitch and covering are reconstructed rather than observed. Museums and experimental archaeologists, for example at the MAMUZ prehistory museum in Austria, have built full-scale and model longhouses to test such reconstructions, and Startin's study estimated the manpower needed to build them.

Significance for roofing history

The LBK longhouse is one of the earliest large, standardised roof structures in Europe. Its internal post rows allowed a wide building to be roofed with short timbers, an aisled principle that reappears in later European longhouses, barns and halls.