While attending a seminar on Museum Education at the Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug as part of my postgraduate studies at the University in Stavanger (UiS), I spotted something I had not expected to see; a replica of a Roman clay lamp. Although not temporally anachronistic (the original farmhouse had been in use between ca. AD 350–550), it was rather out of place geographically.
After having toured the largest of the three reconstructed longhouses—a locale I’ve become very familiar with over the years, both as a lover of history since childhood and as a filmmaker in 2021—I decided to ask our guide and instructor about the lamp. She agreed that it was a bit out of place, but as evidence of lamps from the period are quite scarce, and since the replica was based on lamps from roughly the right period, it had likely been included by the museum simply as a convenient prop to illustrate how people illuminated their homes in antiquity.
Note that the Iron Age Norwegians were hardly isolated from the rest of Europe, though, unlike the later Viking Age, trade with the Mediterranean was somewhat minimal. Still, the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger does feature large bronze pots with Romanesque designs from the same period, Roman glassware was also imported—presumably via Germany and Denmark—as prized luxury goods (a few examples from digitaltmuseum), and the occasional Roman coin do pop up every now and then. However, no one has ever found a Roman style clay lamp, at least not yet.
However, fascinating as all this was, I was (and still am as of the writing of this article) in the process of writing the second book in my Professor Korrigan mystery series, this time focused on the Roman occupation of Britain, and it just so happened that I was planning on writing a chapter where such a lamp featured. In this chapter, without giving too much away, Korrigan encounters what can best be described as a spectral artefact—or an ‘apport’ as it’s called in paranormal circles; a seemingly tangible but actually incorporeal object projected into the present from the past (quite fanciful, I know, but my last novel featured an extra-terrestrial substance, so why not?). As such it was in my best interest to get to know such objects as closely as possible in order to be able to convey to the reader all of the sensory impressions Korrigan would experience handling and studying this mysterious object. As a history student at the university, and someone already familiar to the museum staff—seeing as I literally borrowed the whole longhouse for a short film shoot just a few years earlier—I asked them if I might be allowed to have get a proper look at the lamp, and perhaps even get to actually light it. Despite the fact that the tour/seminar had been at the very tail end of the summer season and they were now officially closed for autumn/winter, they generously agreed to make a special appointment for me.
Killing two birds with one stone I had scheduled to meet with Inger Horve, the Operations Manager at the Iron Age Farm, just after a lecture at the university. The reconstructed farmstead is a part of the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger, which in turn is a branch of the University, and conveniently for me, just right up the road from my faculty on campus. I’d agreed to meet with Horve by the largest of the longhouses, but the lecture had finished early, so I was about twenty minutes ahead of schedule.
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The Iron Age
Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug as you approach it from the old gate.
Before the visitor’s centre was built in 2018 (now closed during the
off-season) this was how you always visited the open-air museum. At least when
you approach from the visitor’s centre (just out of frame to the left) you can’t
immediately see the three (somewhat immersion-breaking) city blocks in the
background. Photo taken November 2026. |
I approached through the old gate—not being able to enter by the now closed visitor’s centre—and passed about a dozen sheep, all quite accustomed to people and thoroughly indifferent to my presence. During the aforementioned tour that had inspired this whole visit a few weeks earlier, our guide and instructor, who had previously worked here as a museum host, introduced us to the two matriarchs of the sheep flock, whose names were Aud Jr. and Embla. As I zigzagged past the clusters of sheep droppings and made my way to the main entrance to the largest longhouse, I also recalled what she had told the group while we’d all gathered in the same spot a few weeks earlier. She’d pointed down at a white blotch on the ground and told us that this was the incriminating evidence left by Aud Jr. after a recent flour raid inside the longhouse; the result of a careless host having forgotten to close the door properly. Inside is a recreation of a hand-turned millstone that is used to demonstrate, especially to schoolchildren, just how labour-intensive it was to produce a simple loaf of bread in Antiquity. However, once the sheep discovered the joys of licking away all the excess flour produced by these demonstrations, they quickly became hard to keep out—especially Aud Jr., whom Inger Horve later described to me as the “ringleader,” and a bad influence on the other sheep. After she’d led us all into the longhouse, the last of us to do so, as per her instructions, had closed the door behind him to not let any sheep sneak in. A few minutes later we heard the muffled, annoyed bleating of a foiled Aud Jr. just outside the door.
Back in the present I was about to knock on the somewhat modern-looking wooden door when I noticed it was open; a slight crack between it and the doorframe. I let myself in and found the place empty of both sheep and humans, though the lights were on. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was intruding, but I did after all have an appointment. I’d never been inside without a tour guide or other tourists present, so I took the opportunity to have a look around and found the Roman lamp down by the now cold hearth, just as it had been previously. Now that I got a proper look at it in the light it was a lot greasier than I’d remembered, almost pitch black. It was sticky to the touch. When Horve arrived, right on time, I was pleased to see that she’d brought not only the wicks and oil as agreed, but a brand-new lamp for my little experiment.
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The interior of the largest longhouse at the Iron Age
Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug. Photo taken November 2026. |
For fuel she had brought a bottle of “Tran,” a brand of cod liver oil that most Norwegians have childhood memories of reluctantly downing as it’s a very popular dietary supplement rich in omega-3 fatty acids and various vitamins. Now this might seem like a bit of an odd choice for lamp fuel—and I was a little surprised myself when I first heard that this is what they commonly use in these lamps at the open-air museum. For context, in antiquity most people would have used olive oil; a commodity that was anything but scarce in the Roman sphere of influence across the Mediterranean during the height of the empire. Olives are, however, not exactly a common thing up here in the cold north of Scandinavia and certainly would have been completely unknown to the Norwegians of the Iron Age. Of course, my interest in these lamps was in relation to Roman Britain, though there too we encounter the same problem. In my research I found that, although olive oil was imported to the Roman occupying forces, it became something of a luxury commodity reserved for the elite. Since my story is focused on the Roman army, specifically the lower-ranking auxiliary troops, olive oil was therefore out of the question. Let’s not forget that olive oil is also foodstuff, so unless you lived at the heart of a wealthy city like Rome or Carthage where you could expect a fair amount of food surplus, you were effectively just burning up something edible. Doing some more research I found that there were several substitutes produced in Roman Britain, such as sesame oil, nut oil, castor oil and animal products such as fish oil. Since fish oil kept popping up in later Medieval British historical references as well, and since it was what the museum had on hand, I decided to simply go with the more practical alternative. I’d also read that fish oil lamps were quite malodorous and produced a smoky flame, all of which seemed to fit in well with my hapless auxiliary soldiers deployed on a cold and rainy island to the north to stand watch on Hadrian’s newly constructed defensive wall with the “barbarian” Celts waiting for their chance to strike back against the invaders on the other side.
As you can see in the photos below these lamps come with a very convenient, recessed hole for pouring the oil into (the “dish” around it is called a discus, though this one was rather flat) and I quickly discovered how easy it was to overfill the lamp and ended up creating a little pool of oil. The wick that Horve had brought with her, which looked like a little shoelace, was made from very finely weaved wool threads. In antiquity such wicks would commonly have been made from scraps of linen, papyrus, or oakum. The matches I was given had been stored in the longhouse, and since this was in early November, they had gotten a little damp. As I sat there striking the same match again and again, barely getting a spark, I could imagine myself back in antiquity with a flint and tinder struggling to start a flame. Eventually I did get a flame going and lit the wick. Once the flame reached the oil in the nozzle (rostrum, literally “beak”) it lit up remarkably well. It was a surprisingly wild flame, completely different from the calm, gentle flicker of a modern candle. As expected, the flame produced a lot of smoke. Horve turned off the electric lights and, although a little daylight did seep in from some small openings in the roof, it was impressive how well it lit up my immediate surroundings. I brought out my notebook and found that I could easily read from it. The biggest surprise, however, was the smell. It was actually quite nice. It had a very fresh hint of lime to it. We checked the Tran bottle and found that it had been lime flavoured to be more palatable, and being such a modern product, probably didn’t give any indication of the foul smells I’d read about. I’ll just have to use my imagination for this particular detail when I describe it in my novel.
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The light looks
quite calm on this photo, but the wild, flickering flame, with its oddly
extended smoky wisp was quite unlike any modern candle I’ve used. It felt
appropriately archaic, though when contrasted with the rustic setting of the
Iron Age farmhouse, it also felt quite modern and “civilised.” |
Horve had also brought with her the stems of some soft rush (juncus effusus), which, when peeled, produce a slightly spongy pith filling that can be used as a wick. In Norwegian this plant is called lyssiv, which literally translates as “light-rush,” suggesting a very old association with lamps. Incidentally, the Norwegian word for the cod liver oil, tran, comes from the Middle Low Saxon trān, which means “drop” or “teardrop” (NOAB). However, the Icelandic name for cod oil is Lýsi, and if we compare this to the aforementioned lyssiv, we have a word that sounds almost identical to the Norwegian word for “light.” In Icelandic Lýsi literally refers to something that provides light (Zoëga, 281), demonstrating that fish oil too has been a common lamp oil in this part of the world for a very long time.
In our case, though, the “light-rush” did not provide all that much light and the flame at the end of the spongy wick was quite small and dim. Horve figured the rush was a bit too damp for our experiment, though it did demonstrate that it was viable as a wick, even if our attempt went out after only five minutes or so. It probably didn’t help either that the original woollen wick used for this lamp had gotten stuck inside the lamp when the end of the wick protruding from the nozzle had burned away some time earlier. In antiquity a small needle, or specialised tweezers, were used to pull the wick out as it burned down to avoid this from happening.
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| The soft rush wick did work but provided a much smaller flame due to it having not been dried out properly. Some unpeeled rush can be seen lying in the background. The dark coating on the lamp is the result of several years of accumulative soot mixed with the overflow of fish oil. |
Trying to figure out exactly what type of Roman lamp the replicas were based on according to established typological classification proved a lot trickier than I’d expected, though they both seem to correspond pretty well with the Loeschcke type X lamps (or Buchi type X-a), often referred to as the “Roman Factory Lamp” and dating to around AD 90 to the end of the third century. These are generally identified by their lack of decoration, though Bacchic or comic mask motifs do frequently appear in the centre of the characteristically flat-bottomed discus. Another distinguishing feature is the raised rim that forms a channel all the way out to and around the wick-hole on the nozzle, not an altogether uncommon feature, but the sharp angles are very typical of the Loeschcke type X. So far so good. On each side, outside the circular rim, are two or three knobs, which on actual antique lamps are the remains of broken off rings used for suspending the lamp with chains. How exactly only two attachment points were supposed to suspend the lamp without it tipping over and spilling the oil out the nozzle beats me but looking at a lot of photos from museums I see that many of these lamps did indeed only have two attachment points. Either way, our modern lamp-maker has either added these knobs simply as an allusion to this historical suspension feature or may simply have been unaware of their exact purpose. What we’re left with are two vestigial dimples divorced from their original practical purpose. I’m glad I discovered this, as, when I was standing inside the longhouse, holding the lamp in my hand, I kept wondering what on earth these little knobs were meant for. They seemed a rather pointless detail to add purely for decoration, and I could find no practical reason for them as I held it in my hand, seeing as they did not provide a natural place for my fingers to rest either.
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Two examples of Loeschcke type X, or “factory lamps,” from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (public domain photos). Left: Terracotta mould-made lamp decorated with a theatre mask design, Roman (Cologne, Germany), 1st–2nd century AD. Object Number: 83.AQ.377.441. Right: Terracotta mould-made lamp, Roman (possibly North African), 1st century AD. Object Number: 83.AQ.377.444. |
All in all, I feel it was a very successful experiment. Although I still have no idea how burning fish oil would have smelled in antiquity, and there are still certain details that needs to be ironed out for my novel, what started as a vaguely defined object I’d only seen in photos; with no real sense of scale, weight, texture, and actual efficiency, I now understand as a tangible, practical object.
This whole experience, even if it mostly just consisted of me fiddling with a couple lamps for about half an hour, and discussing history with a museum-educator, actually highlights really well the value of institutions such as The Iron Age Farm (Jernaldergården) at Ullandhaug, and open-air museums in general. For the past few years now I’ve been spending much of my time sitting in lecture halls, listening to historians talk about the past, and while this is certainly very valuable (and something I quite enjoy), it doesn’t do much to put you into the shoes of the people who lived in the past. You get a lot of interesting information but few tangible experiences to connect them to. But when standing in a dimly lit, slightly damp, chilly reconstruction of an Iron Age House, feet planted on well-trodden earth (the original excavated flooring by the way), and the only source of light you have is a flickering flame emanating from a small clay container you’re holding in your hand, you do get a certain empathic connection with the past; a feeling of presence. Of course, such props are just that, props, and not a true indication of the past, but it does concretise and bring to life an otherwise abstract past in a way that is educational on a much more tactile level than reading a book or listening to a lecture ever can.
And this is far from my first experience of this kind in this very building. As I alluded to earlier, I have been coming to this open-air museum fairly regularly since I was a child, and when I was nine years old, I actually spent the night here with a group of kids as part of a special arrangement. I got to taste bread made with flour grounded in the millstone and baked over a flame. It was surprisingly tasty, though the stone-ground flour did mean it was infused with grit; small particles of stone that ground against my teeth. Every bite into the otherwise soft bread had a slightly unsettling crunch to it. At that moment I understood why skeletons from this era always have noticeably worn-down teeth and why historians often talked about how they could identify someone’s approximate age by simply looking at how worn down the teeth were. If I had been eating bread like this every day my whole life my teeth would already have been in a pretty bad state as well. Likewise, sleeping on what effectively amounts to a wooden shelf with animal hides to keep you warm (though for practical reasons we did bring modern sleeping bags as well) and having a low flame crackling nearby, the flickering flames casting dancing shadows around the wooden support beams, is one of the most vivid experiences I’ve had in relation to my appreciation and understanding of history. And this kind of intuitive historical consciousness is exactly what places like the Iron Age Farm were made for.
Literature:
Bailey, Donald M. Greek and Roman Pottery Lamps. London: British Museum, 1972.
Bussière, Jean, and Birgitta Lindros Wohl. Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017. http://www.getty.edu/publications/ancientlamps (Accessed 04 November 2026).
Walters, H. B. Catalogue of the Greek and Roman Lamps in the British Museum. London: Printed by order of the Trustees, 1914.
Zoëga, Geir Tómasson. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
PS. For some much nicer exterior photos of the Iron Age Farm than the one I quickly snapped on my way up from campus, plus some more details about its history, check out my previous article The Locations that Inspired The Starseed.
