Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (7.1992/1995)

TOOLS & TILLAGE VII 2-3 1993-1994

125

Age, No 2 on Classsical and Hellenistic Periods,
No 3 on the Roman Empire and No 4 on Medieval
and Modern Periods.
Most papers are abundantly illustrated with
maps, instructive drawings of technical construc-
tions and typology as well as by photographs from
the field and in museums. The book is recom-
mended as a most useful source.
Axel Steensberg

VIGGO NIELSEN: Jernalderens plojntng, Store
Vildmose. Summary: Iron Age ploughing. Store
Vildmose, 191-213. Vendsyssels historiske Mu-
seum 1993. 220 pp. ISBN 87 89904-03-6.
The author of this magnificent pionering work,
Viggo Nielsen, has university degrees in prehis-
toric archaeology as well as in law. He started his
career in archeological excavation as a pupil of the
renowned scholar Gudmund Hatt. But alongside
his sparetime occupation with the registration and
surveying of so-called “Celtic Fields” in Danish
woods, he also made a career in the Ministries of
Education and the Environment. When he retired
in 1990, he was Director of the Preservation De-
partment.
Since then, he has concentrated his energy on
the publishing of his studies in Iron Age Agricul-
ture, supported as ever by his skilled and meticu-
lous wife Gudrun, to whom this book is dedi-
cated. There is a 22 page English summary. The
more than 120 illustrations and 17 plates have
short captions in English as well as more substan-
tial ones in Danish. An introductory chapter is
followed by chapters on the bog and its formation,
archaeology in the bog, the investigation in Gris-
hojgards Krat, the exposures, the 17 plates, the
fields and the ploughing, the burial mounds, and
lastly plough marks under barrows, a comparative
survey.
Such ard-traces in the subsoil below burial
mounds have been detected widely in Europe after
the Dutch professor A.E.van Giffen in the
Nieuwe Drentsche Volksalmanak 1936 had cor-
rectly interpreted these criss-cross marks in the
subsoil as traces of ard ploughing. Gudmund Hatt
and his assistants surveyed 117 localities first and

foremost in marginal Jutland moors and published
them in his “Oldtidsagre” in Kgl. danske Viden-
skabernes Selskabs arkajologisk-kunsthist. Skrifter
1949 with a 25 page English summary. In England
E. Cecil Curwen was a pioneer, and in Germany
M. Muller-Wille made a survey of the German ma-
terial (1965). Viggo Nielsen has however investi-
gated and surveyed more localities than anybody
else, and is now preparing to publish them as a
follow up to his Vildmose publication.
The present book is, however, the first publi-
cation of extensive and meticulously investigated
ard-traces inside their actual field boundaries and
dated to 5th-4th century BC. It will be a model for
future uncoverings of marks of prehistoric culti-
vation throughout the world. In the Oriental
countries so far only Dr. B.B.Lal of the Indian
Archaeological Survey has used this obviously
most elucidatory method in the Harappan town of
Kalibangan, NW India, but in a more limited area.
The two pioneers had not been informed of each
other’s work.
In 17 plates of the book are reproduced verti-
cally photographed ard-furrows as they appeared,
filled with dark topsoil in the light yellow-brown
coloured subsoil. Each plate covers a square of
20x20 m, reproduced on a scale of 1:200. Origi-
nally each vertical photograph covered 5x5 m, and
they had to be taken as soon as the topsoil had
been removed and the surface smoothed before
the soil dried and the furrow contours became
blurred. Some of the plates consist of up to one
hundred such squares, e.g. pl. 7. Fig.s 46-47 give a
total view of the excavated area, Fig. 46 in pho-
tographs and Fig. 47 as a drawing which interprets
fields I-XIII of which only VI and VIII A-B are
complete. In a corner of field I, and partly super-
imposed upon a field boundary is a burial mound.
It can be dated to c. 400 AD, which means that the
mound is about 800 years younger than the fields.
It is interesting to observe that this small ap-
pearance of so called Celtic-Fields is just as irreg-
ular as some of the oldest finds below burial
mounds from the Stone- and Bronze-Ages of
which Viggo Nielsen presents quite an extensive
survey on pp. 165-187. This means that no strict
development from small, irregular plots to larger
more rectangular ones can be substantiated. The