EARLIEST HUMAN HABITATIONS HOERNES. 577 



sides. In front of the door was a small open vestibule which must 

 have served to protect the entrance, as evidenced by a projecting roof. 

 In the center of the principal chamber was the hearth, and above it, 

 in the gabled roof, an opening to let out the smoke. The corners of 

 this opening rested on posts which were placed around the hearth. 

 In this simplest form it was the house of a small rural family, but it 

 also constituted the seignorial house, in the citadels which were 

 erected on the continent and surrounded with Cyclopean walls, in 

 Argolis and Asia Minor, while the palaces of Crete show no trace 

 whatever of this kind of structure. In the Hellenic period the 

 Megaron type gave rise to the Greek temple, especially the temple 

 with pilasters jutting out (Templum in antis). It appeared, also, as 

 an element in the great buildings of Hellenistic times, as at Per- 

 gamum and Priene. At least it could not suffice for the growing 

 needs which a dwelling of a modern period had to satisfy. 



These are well-known facts. But they were employed to establish 

 a prehistoric phase of the " Megaron " type. Crete and the neighbor- 

 ing Orient were left out of consideration because they presented 

 nothing analogous ; besides, this house with a hearth and a gable end 

 suited a climate colder than that of Egypt or western Asia. R. 

 Henning (Das deutsche Haus in seiner historischen Entwicklung, 

 1882) found an affinity between the old German and old Greek 

 houses, though so far he could refer for the Greek house to the 

 templum in antis (the "Megarons," of Troy, etc., have not yet been 

 discovered) and the Homeric description of the house of Odysseus 

 and as northern analogies could only quote the Norwegian peasant 

 houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A. D. 



The resemblances of the houses of the North with the " Megaron " 

 type are slight and belong to later periods, if not entirely to modern 

 times. A house of the Viking period (800-1050 A. D.) at Augerum 

 in Bleking, south Sweden, had around the hearth, which stood in the 

 center, four posts supporting the open roof for the passage of the 

 smoke. In front of the entrance two posts upheld the projecting 

 roof. The plan of this building was not quadrangular, but oval, 

 nearly round (Montelius, Kulturgeschichte Schwedens, p. 238, fig. 

 451). The German house, discovered and described by C. Schuch- 

 hardt (Prehistorische Zeitschrift, I, 1909, pp. 209 and 59) on the 

 Romerschanze at Potsdam, a trench which was in later times occu- 

 pied by the Slavs, presented the greatest similarities to the 

 " Megaron," but the date of that house, which consisted of a frame of 

 wickerwork, filled out with earth, is doubtful ; it dates, at the earliest, 

 from the beginning of the Christian era. Tliere is, then, no basis for 

 calling the Megaron type the building form of " German antiquity " 

 or, as Henning does, " The antique Aryan form." It is probable that 

 44863°— SM 1913 37 



