FrankN
Regular Member
You are welcome. And thanks for the link, there seem indeed to be quite some parallels. The interesting thing about the site on the Saale is that next to the boiling pits they found there evidence of salt-making, and of pork slaughtering. It is also remarkable that they not only found one or two, but some twenty pits in a row. This was a medium-sized business at least.
The Fulacht Fladhs appear to be a bit more multi-purpose. Has salt-boiling equipment, or some potential salt containers, been found there? Otherwise, the beer-brewing theory has quite some charme. Collective brewing and drinking has also been proposed as one of the functions of German henges and later enclosures, especially those that had waste pits, burial sites, but no evidence of substantial settlement.
According to Wikipedia, the picture is from a site run by the Danish Nature Conservation Fund, where they intentionally have re-introduced medieval wood pasture in order to preserve some endangered plant species related to this traditional habitat. Their homepage is in Danish, however, so I wasn't able to figure out further details. Based on the Danish model, several wood pastures are being re-created in Northern Germany, but they are too recent to already provide a picture how such a wood pasture looked.
Anyway, this is what you get if you also let sheep graze on deforested areas in the Central European Plain - the Luneburg Heath. 150 years ago, large parts of northern Germany looked like this (the Luneburg and Halle/ Saale salt works had enormous wood fuel demand). Most of it has been re-forested in the meantime, but some parts are still preserved and now a popular tourist attraction:
