ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that the sources concerning the Viking Age settlement in Scandinavia are actually poorer than for the settlement from older periods of the Iron Age, you can nevertheless nowadays state that the general character of the Viking Age settlement in Scandinavia in most aspects was a continuation of how the settlement was formed and organised earlier during the three immediate preceding archaeological periods. The same is also valid in most cases for how the settlement was localised in the landscape. Any larger structural changes of settlement do not occur during the Viking Age. In the main areas of agriculture, medium and large villages dominated. In the woodlands, and in fjord and mountainous areas, there were, on the contrary, mainly smaller units: hamlets and solitary farms (Hvass 1988; Kaldal Mikkelsen 1999; Lillehammer 1999: 13 ff.; Myhre 2002: 132 ff.; Ethelberg 2003; Holst 2004; Fallgren 2006: 80 ff.). In certain regions, however, some important architectonic changes of the old three-aisled longhouses took place during the course of the Viking Age. And in other parts of Scandinavia this old type of house construction came, completely or partly, to be replaced with an entirely new building type, the one-aisled house with roof-supporting walls.
