Donat: Häuser der Bronzezeit und Eisenzeit

This volume on the Bronze Age and Iron Age houses of the Northwest European lowlands and (west)central Europe is the product of Peter Donat’s long-standing interest in contextualising the house-building traditions of southern and central Germany. Following his retirement, he took upon himself the challenging task to inventory and compare house plans from the Bronze and Iron Age in a geographical zone spanning Denmark, the Netherlands, Flanders, Germany and extending eastwards into the Czech Republic and Austria. With the numbers of house plans already known from these areas and the rate in which developer-led archaeology (p. 11) increases this in various nations, this is no small endeavor. In this sense, P. Donat’s inventory is foremost a bold and much-needed overview of West- and Central European housebuilding traditions that will serve as a starting point for the contextualisation of settlement excavations across these regions. Numerous overview plates of house-plans (put to the same scale) and convenient maps (figs 7; 9; 16 and 35) help the reader take in all this information. Peter Donat has managed to collect, digest and present an utmost valuable inventory of West and Central European Bronze and Iron Age house plans, and has done this with tremendous attention to detail and an appropriately critical view (e. g. pp. 33; 131; 137; 184; 190). It will provide a much needed and helpful starting point to many scholars in the areas under study to contextualise their newly found house plans. Moreover, it unlocks a wealth of data on specific house-elements such as sods walls, byre partitions, partitioning walls or hearth locations, for which it is very hard to acquire a supra-regional overview.