![]() ![]() In the millennia since, the bed has evolved to take on many different forms – reflecting the beliefs and practical concerns of the cultures that people have found themselves in. ![]() They often held deep symbolic meanings and links to the afterlife, according to Fagan and Durrani. These early beds were not just places to rest. Some 1,700 miles (2,735km) from Orkney, in Malta, ritualised burial tunnels have revealed evidence of early incarnations of this furniture – including a clay figurine of a woman slumbering peacefully on her side, one hand under her head, on a simple raised platform. The sandstone beds at Skara Brae are among the oldest ever found, along with a series of impressions left in the soil at the settlement of Durrington Walls near Stonehenge – the spectral outlines of long-vanished wooden bed boxes, where the builders of that monument may have once slept.Įmerging just over 5,000 years ago, not long after other pioneering technologies such as writing, bed frames appeared in several places at around the same time. Then the first bed frames began to appear. For most of our species' existence, it's thought that sleeping spaces consisted of deep piles of carefully layered foliage topped with soft, pest-resistant leaves. In the book What we did in bed: a horizontal history, the University of California, Santa Barbara anthropologist Brian Fagan and archaeologist Nadia Durrani chart their development from the very beginning. Humans have been making beds for hundreds of thousands of years. Setting aside the ancient inscriptions found on some – and the occasional skeleton stashed underneath – perhaps they could almost belong to the 21st Century. And yet, with tall headboards and raised sides, they have an instantly recognisable shape. Like most of the artefacts found on this tree-less island, these prehistoric beds are made from slabs of cold, hard stone. Alongside storage boxes and dressing tables complete with shelves, there are two rectangular enclosures, around the length of a human. The dwellings at Skara Brae, in the far north of Scotland, mostly have the same setup – a roughly 40 sq m (430 sq ft) room with a central hearth and an assortment of prehistoric furniture. But inside each residence are two objects that still look familiar to modern eyes – beds. This maze of fuzzy green mounds – large, single-room houses surrounded by thick walls topped with grass and connected with covered stone passageways – was abandoned some four and a half thousand years ago. Amid the windswept expanse of the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of the Scottish island of Orkney, is the ancient village of Skara Brae. ![]()
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