Skip to main content

Knap of Howar

Hi Guys this is my post today. It's about the Knap of Howar ( The oldest building in the world). The Knap of 

Howar on the island of Papa Westray in Orkney, Scotland is a Neolithic farmstead which may be the oldest preserved stone house in northern Europe.[1] Radiocarbon dating shows that it was occupied from 3700 BC to 2800 BC, earlier than the similar houses in the settlement at Skara Brae on the Orkney Mainland.[2]

The site[edit]

The farmstead consists of two adjacent rounded rectangular thick-walled buildings with very low doorways facing the sea. The larger and older structure is linked by a low passageway to the other building, which has been interpreted as a workshop or a second house. They were constructed on an earlier midden, and were surrounded by midden material which has protected them. There are no windows; the structures were presumably lit by fire, with a hole in the roof to let out smoke. Though they now stand close to the shore, they would have originally lain inland. The shore shows how the local stone splits into thin slabs, giving a ready source of construction material.

Looking back through the low entrance doorway into the main house, a visitor's knapsack gives an idea of scale.
The main house now looks out over the sea.

The walls still stand to an eaves height of 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in), and the stone furniture is intact giving a vivid impression of life in the house. Fireplaces, partition screens, beds and storage shelves are almost intact, and post holes were found indicating the roof structure.

Evidence from the middens shows that the inhabitants were keeping cattle, sheep and pigs, cultivating barley and wheat and gathering shellfish as well as fishing for species which have to be line caught using boats.

Finds of finely-made and decorated Unstan ware pottery link the inhabitants to chambered cairn tombs nearby and to sites far afield including Balbridie and Eilean Domhnuill. The name Howar is believed to be derived from Old Norse word haugr meaning mounds or barrows. The site is in the care of Historic Scotland.[3]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Computer programming

Computer programming  is the process of designing and building an  executable   computer program  to accomplish a specific  computing  result or to perform a specific task. Programming involves tasks such as: analysis, generating  algorithms ,  profiling  algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms in a chosen  programming language  (commonly referred to as  coding ). [1] [2]  The  source code  of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to  programmers , rather than  machine code , which is directly executed by the  central processing unit . The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task (which can be as complex as an  operating system ) on a  computer , often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus often requires expertise in several differen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln  ( / ˈ l ɪ ŋ k ən / ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer and statesman who served as the 16th  president of the United States  from 1861 until  his assassination  in 1865. Lincoln led the nation through the  American Civil War , the country's greatest moral, cultural, constitutional, and political crisis. He succeeded in preserving the  Union ,  abolishing   slavery , bolstering the  federal government , and modernizing the  U.S. economy . Lincoln was born into poverty in a log cabin and was raised on the  frontier  primarily in  Indiana . He was self-educated and became a lawyer,  Whig Party  leader,  Illinois  state  legislator , and U.S. Congressman  from Illinois . In 1849, he returned to his law practice but became vexed by the opening of additional lands to slavery as a result of the  Kansas–Nebraska Act . He reentered politics in 1854, b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discord (software)

Discord   is a   VoIP ,   instant messaging   and   digital distribution   platform designed for creating communities. Users communicate with   voice calls ,   video calls ,   text messaging , media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers". [note 1]   Servers are a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice chat channels. Discord runs on   Windows ,   macOS ,   Android ,   iOS ,   iPadOS ,   Linux , and in   web browsers . As of 2021, the service has over 300 million registered users and over 140 million monthly   active users . History The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded  OpenFeint , a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevsky, who had founded  Guildwork , another social gaming platform. Citron sold OpenFeint to  GREE  in 2011 for  US$ 104 million, [9]  which he used to found Hammer ...
Post a Comment
Read more