Cooking-Pit Sites as Assembly Sites: Lunde in Vestfold, South-East Norway - A Regional Assembly Site in the Early Iron Age?

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, several large-scale cooking-pit sites have been uncovered in Norway and interpreted as traces of large gatherings. Similar cooking-pits are increasingly found by development-led excavations across northern Europe. Cooking-pits are earth ovens for dry-cooking. A pit is dug, filled with stones which are heated, and when the pit is sealed by a layer of turf, it will function like an oven for cooking meat or fish. There are two types of sites: ‘cooking pit lines’, and ‘unstructured sites’.1 The focus of this chapter is on the latter, which are often referred to as ‘specialised cooking-pit sites’ as they are characterised by large numbers of pits unrelated to contemporary settlement and mainly dated to the Roman Iron Age and the Migration period, that is, ad 0–600.2 Their functions are debated.3 Some see them as traces of cult sites. Sometimes these sites