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THE CHANGING BRONZE AGE

THE FINNISH ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY, ISKOS 20, 2011


Gods of High Places and Deep Romantic Chasms
Introductory remarks to a study of the landscape situation of
Bronze Age sacriicial sites in the Lake Mlaren area
Martin Rundkvist, Vantvgen 9, SE-13344 Saltsjbaden, Sweden
martin.rundkvist@gmail.com
This paper outlines work in progress with the Bronze Age sacriicial sites of the Lake Mlaren
provinces in Sweden. The projects goals are twofold: a) to understand the landscape rules
behind the siting of deposits, and thereby b) to develop predictive model that would allow
scholars to ind undisturbed Bronze Age deposits without the aid of farmers, dredgers or
ditch diggers.
After closer study of nine sites in Uppland and Sdermanland provinces in the ield
and numerous ones in the archives, I have found that the Bronze Age people under study
preferred to make sacriices at wet, high, topographically dramatic and ancestral locations.
There are inds from bogs and white-water river gorges, hilltops, a cave and a settlement-
site that had once been important. In the rare dry-land deposit locations, eye-catching
boulders were sought out.
Known sacriicial sites appear to prefer a location 1.21.5 km from settlement-indicating
burnt mounds, rock art and the coeval seashore. This means that sacriicial sites are
typically part of the same contiguous sightlined landscape room as the homes of the people
who frequented them.
Keywords: Bronze Age, Sweden, Uppland, Sdermanland, Lake Mlaren, deposits,
sacriicial inds, landscape, ritual
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As eer beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Samuel T. Coleridge, from Kubla Khan
Introduction
It has long been known that Bronze Age people
in North-west Europe preferred wet sites for their
sacriices: streams, rivers, lakes, fens, bogs, even
inlets of the sea. This paper relects the thin-
king of a Late Iron Age scholar after a year and
halfs study of this subject indoors and in the
ield. It turns out that be yond the baseline wet-
land theme, Bronze Age sacriicial sites in the
159
GODS OF HIGH PLACES AND DEEP ROMANTIC CHASMS
Lake Mlaren area in Sweden are highly diver-
se. And the people behind them had a strong
predilection for landscape locations that a mo-
dern visitor will ind dramatic, even sublime.
This latter observation is of course some-
what subjective. In the debate over intuitive
methods in landscape studies, I side with
Andrew Fleming (1999; 2006; 2007) rather
than Christopher Tilley (1994; 2010). Personal
phenomenological impressions are impos-
sible to communicate clearly and have an en-
tirely unknown relationship to what people ex-
perienced during prehistory, and so they have
no place in scientiic discourse. But as Fleming
and Tilley both agree, this is not to say that a
landscape archaeo logist can stay indoors. In
order to understand a landscape well enough to
speak clearly about its characteristics and for-
mulate testable hypotheses, an arch aeo logist
must traverse it, preferably on foot.
Archaeological sites are commonly sorted
into three main categories: settlements, burials
and deposits (e.g. Malmer 2002). To these,
the Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia adds
abundant rock art sites and a far rarer class of
hilltop sanctuaries. In the Lake Mlaren area,
all except the sacriicial sites (or depositional
sites, to use a studiedly non-committal term)
and hilltop enclosures are readily identiied
in the ield when well preserved and vegeta-
tion permitting. While the spatial relationship
between settlements, burials and rock art has
long been rather well understood (Kjelln
& Hyenstrand 1977; Damell 1985; Wigren
1987), the sacriices are harder to tie into the
wider landscape context of the society that
produced them as they tend to avoid the other
site categories.
All but one of the main categories of
Bronze Age site around Lake Mlaren and
the adjoining province of stergtland have
recently been the subjects of monographs:
settlements (Ulln 1997; Borna-Ahl kvist
2002), burials (Victor 2002; Theden 2004),
rock art (Hauptman Wahlgren 2002) and hill-
top sanctuaries (Olausson 1995). The sacri-
icial sites form the exception. The bronzes
themselves received solid treatments long ago
(Ekholm 1919; 1921; Baudou 1960; Oldeberg
197476), and since hardly any new inds have
been forthcoming, scholars have not pursued
that avenue of research further. Sonja Wigren
(1987: 5362) and Susanne Theden (2004:
6882) have however published brief over-
views for Sdermanland province.
Scholarship is severely hampered by the
facts that a) sacriiced objects are hardly ever
found any more, and b) during the period
when they were found, scholars were hardly
ever involved in their retrieval. This is because
Swedish Bronze Age sacriicial sites are not
identiiable on the surface: most are after all
in rivers, lakes and bogs, where few archae-
ologists have been able to do any directed
large-scale ieldwork. And the main era of
wetland reclamation in Sweden ended before
World War II (Runefelt 2008). This happened
about the time when tractors replaced horses
in agriculture, placing the farmer in front of
the plough where he can no longer see what it
turns out of the ground. Finally, Swedish law
effectively prevents the growth of any signii-
cant metal-detector hobby (Rundkvist 2008).
To my knowledge, the last time a multi-object
non-grave bronze deposit surfaced in the Lake
Mlaren provinces was in 1980, when the
military cleared the Jrvafltet iring range
in southernmost Uppland of unexploded am-
munition using mine detectors (SHM 31368).
Furthermore, data coverage is poor. Digging
or dredging in various landscape situations can
be seen as a kind of experiment as to whether a
Bronze Age deposit will be found. Yet we only
have information about a small subset of the
cases where something was found, and none
about the innumerable experiments that have
turned out negative.
My on-going research concerns Bronze
Age sacriicial or depositional sites. That is, I
aim to produce new knowledge on the land-
scape scale: not on the artefact level or on the
level of the province-wide distribution map,
but on a scale of hundreds of meters, where
you can see from one studied landscape feature
to another and walk between them in an hour
or two. Rather than treating the ind context
160
MARTIN RUNDKVIST
as an attribute of each ind, my current work
views inds as attributes of the places under
study. This means that I am primarily inter-
ested in inds with a reasonably detailed spa-
tial provenance, those that can be tied securely
to a place. And I aim beyond the anecdotal, to
identify regularities, Bronze Age rules of land-
scape.
Ultimately, I envision a predictive model,
being a set of analytical tools that would allow
archaeo logists to go out into the landscape like
homing missiles, as it were, and ind Bronze
Age sacriicial sites without the aid of farm-
ers, peat cutters and dredging crews. Then we
could learn what sort of materials and struc-
tures those 19th century inders left on site
when they selected the objects they handed
in to the authorities. And we could get a solid
palaeo-ecological background for sacriicial
events. With such knowledge, we would be
in a much better position to say how Bronze
Age sacriices were performed around that an-
cient inlet of the Baltic sea that is now Lake
Mlaren.
Ritual and Rationality
As Richard Bradley has argued at length
(2005), the distinction between ritual and
domestic behaviour is not very helpful when
dealing with prehistoric societies. One may
easily think that ritual equals irrational and
thus functionally inexplicable. Conversely,
domestic would then equal functionalist.
But it must be remembered that it is impossible
to be more rational than what your level of
knowledge about the world allows. This
has nothing to do with the once-fashionable
epistemological relativism where there was talk
of different ways of knowing. Simply put, in
the pre-scientiic era that makes up almost the
entire history of human culture, people did not
know very well what was real and not. It was
extremely dificult for them to determine what
sort of actions would produce reliable effects.
Most likely, almost all prehistoric action was
believed to be functional.
If everyone believes in the Lady in the
Lake and atheism is unheard of, then it will ap-
pear entirely rational to make sacriices to her.
In fact, doing so may produce solidly benei-
cial effects not thanks to any divine interven-
tion, but because it impresses the neighbours.
This view coexists easily with some level of
modern-style economic rationality where rare
imported goods such as bronze would be un-
usually valuable and prestigious and thus apt
as sacriicial gifts. And conversely, it means
that when we see evidence of people acting in
mundane, sensible ways that we can easily ex-
plain from a modern functionalist perspective,
then we are probably not dealing with behav-
iour that prehistoric people saw as belonging
to any separate category of its own. If you re-
ally believe in gods, then sacriicing to them
looks as sensible and/or ritual as digging deep
post-holes to keep your house from collaps-
ing. With the exception of people clinging to
old belief systems, every age acts upon its best
available knowledge.
My own interpretation of why the depos-
its were made and left in place is that all were
certainly left for reasons that appeared rational
to people at the time. But very few were left
for reasons that make any functional sense to
someone with a scientiic world-view. A be-
lief in the supernatural was clearly involved.
We will most likely never know whether we
would classify the ictional entities to which
the sacriices were directed as gods, demons,
spirits or ancestors. But Tacitus tells us that
people believed in gods in 1st century AD
Northern Europe, and the Mediterranean writ-
ten evidence for godly beliefs at the time of the
Scandinavian Bronze Age is extensive indeed.
Note also that irrational should not be
taken to mean random, particularly when
we consider that rational behaviour depends
on your level of knowledge about the world.
Rituals, while irrational to someone with a
scientiic world-view, are in fact anything but
random. It is part of the terms deinition that a
ritual is structured, even scripted, and proceeds
according to certain rules that allows it to be
161
GODS OF HIGH PLACES AND DEEP ROMANTIC CHASMS
repeated in a recognisable form that the par-
ticipants and audience accept as traditional (cf.
papers in Kyriakidis 2007). And for this rea-
son, archaeologists should not dispense with
the concept of ritual action. As I have argued
above, almost all human action during prehis-
tory was very likely perceived as rational at the
time. But much of it is nevertheless likely to
have been ritualised.
Retrievable and Irretrievable
Deposits
Scholars have attempted to distinguish
retrievable deposits, hoards, from
irretrievable permanent deposits, offerings
(see Berggren 2009; 2010 for overviews). The
idea is that dry-land hoards are buried secretly
and temporarily for mundane functionalist
reasons, while wetland offerings are disposed
of permanently to communicate with the gods
and often for reasons of ostentatious display.
While this dichotomy is an empirical reality
(Levy 1982), it is doubtful if the two classes
of ind should really be seen as exponents of
two different modes of thought when we are
dealing with a pre-monetary prestige economy
and a pre-scientiic world-view (Karsten 1994:
3031; Bradley 1998; 2005: 145164). In
other words: it is true that some of these inds
could have been retrieved, and it is true that
we often see different object types in those
contexts than we do in bogs and rivers, but it
is uncertain (and possibly untestable) whether
the two classes of ind were really deposited
for very different reasons.
I have in fact yet to see a convincing ar-
gument for why we should interpret a given
retrievable prehistoric metal hoard as mun-
dane from a modern perspective. Christoph
Huth (2009) makes the valuable point that the
metal deposits of the Late Bronze Age and
the Viking Period are similar in most respects
but have been interpreted very differently.
But while Huth hints that he favours a mer-
cantile interpretation for both classes of inds,
I instead hold the opposite view. Few Viking
Period hoards were buried for mundane rea-
sons and even fewer were allowed to remain
underground for such reasons.
It is in any case important to inter-
pret the reason that a hoard was assembled
separately from the reason that it was buried
in earth or sunk into water. I see no reason to
question the idea that scrap metal hoards were
collected for recasting. But keep in mind that
the vast majority of the collected scrap did de-
monstrably become recast, as seen from the
alloy composition of Bronze Age metalwork.
This means that the buried scrap-metal hoards
that we know of are ones that received unusual
treatment and were not allowed to walk the
normal path of their kind. While scrap metal
hoards by deinition contain many fragmented
objects, the pieces rarely add up to complete
artefacts. Stuart Needham (2001: 288) argues
that this may be due to a custom similar to that
where an animal is sacriiced and only certain
parts are burnt as offerings to a god. Perhaps
the scrap metal hoards contain the gods share
of a much larger collection of objects that were
re-cast for renewed use. Joanna Brck (2001:
157) suggests that the dry-land deposits repre-
sent metal given to the earth in return for goods
taken from the earth, including grain. (Whether
or not the earth was envisioned as a personi-
ied deity here would be dificult to tell.) This
may be so. Note, however, that in most parts
of Northern Europe including Scandinavia, it
cannot have been evident to people that metal
had subterranean origins. Bronze came from
the packs of traders, not from the earth like
grain did.
Deposit Diversity
A scholar wishing to make general statements
about all Bronze Age sacriicial deposits will
soon realise that this is impossible because
of their diversity. There are many kinds of
deposit, and it is highly likely that they follow
different landscape rules (cf. Bradley 2000:
53; Fontijn 2002). The Lake Mlaren area is
not very rich in inds of this kind compared
to e.g. southernmost Scandinavia, and so we
cannot operate with too many categories. But
162
MARTIN RUNDKVIST
the following distinctions are in my opinion
indispensable.
Wet vs. dry. I assume that wet deposition
was intentionally permanent, which is part of
what sacriice means. Bronze, unlike stone,
retains a visible indication of the environment
where it has spent the past millennia. Under
wet conditions, the yellow metal sheen of the
objects survives intact or darkens partly to
black or brown. On dry land, the alloy devel-
ops a blanket patina of green verdigris that is
sometimes beautifully smooth, in other cases
crumbly and porous to the point where an ob-
jects surface detail is lost. In my opinion, this
distinction must have meant something im-
portant. I am not however persuaded that the
dry-land deposits were buried and allowed to
remain buried for reasons that would make ra-
tional sense to a modern observer (or, for that
matter, to a homo economicus).
Single vs. multiple. As a rule, the inds that
mark the sites under study are single objects.
Multi-object deposits are rare and tend to con-
tain unusual object types.
Chronology. The Swedish Bronze Age last-
ed some twelve centuries. We must allow for
change over this time span and make good use
of the typo-chronology established by earlier
research.
Functional and material categories.
Weapons, ornaments, tools, metalworking de-
bris; bronze, stone, bone and pottery: these cat-
egories must be important as well.
Although society was in all likelihood per-
meated by ritual, my project treats sacriicial
sites as worthy of separate consideration and
avoids closer study of settlements and burials.
Therefore, one common ind category must be
disregarded: the stray single Bronze Age object
without any sign of wet deposition or place-
ment at an unusual dry site. This places most
stone axes out of the investigations bounds,
as they tend to be stray inds and by their na-
ture cannot retain any information about their
depositional environment.
Site Continuity vs. Continuity
of Site Selection Criteria
David Fontijn (2002: 260) points out that
repeated sacriices in the same bog or river
stretch over centuries presents a bit of a
conundrum since the deposits would not have
left any visible traces to attract subsequent
groups of celebrants. He argues that the
explanation is oral traditions about sacriicial
sites: they may not have looked like much, but
people told and re-told stories about what had
once happened there. With Stijn Arnoldussen,
Fontijn has later suggested another explanation
that appears more likely given the long periods
involved: the sacriicial traditions may not
have conveyed speciic memories of individual
sites, but instead transmitted general landscape
rules governing sacriices (Arnoldussen &
Fontijn 2006; cf. Fontijn 2007).
In this view, a person who sought an ap-
propriate place to sacriice bronzes might not
know whether or not anyone had done so be-
fore at the individual site, but would ind that
it fulilled traditional ritual demands. The idea
might not be This is a known place where the
Lady of the Lake has been contacted before,
but This is the kind of place where She may
be contacted. Such a perspective might ex-
plain the pattern Fontijn (2002: 260263) sees
in Limburg, where Bronze Age sacriices are
placed in strangely unspeciic and rather ex-
tensive zones in the landscape, not at discrete
places. If the landscape rules of sacriice that
we seek here were not strongly determinant,
then sacriices would have tended to spread
out. But as Fontijn points out (p. 275), the rule
cannot have been as simple as Any wet place
will do.
Recurrent Site Characteristics
In April and May of 2010 I visited nine
sacriicial sites in Uppland and Sdermanland
provinces, selecting them by the criteria that
I had to be able to ascertain their locations
closely, the inds should preferably be rather
163
GODS OF HIGH PLACES AND DEEP ROMANTIC CHASMS
rich, and I favoured sites located within
walking distance of each other. The winter
had been long and cold with abundant snow,
and so vegetation was still sparse and much
plough soil remained open to ield walking.
This ensured the best possible conditions
for landscape observation. A year later I
directed plough-soil metal-detecting at
three of the sites: Hjortsberga in Vrdinge,
Tckhammarsbro and Lilla Hrnevi (and
ieldwalking at Tckhammarsbro), without
making any relevant inds. I summarise some
characteristics of the nine sites in table 1.
Commenting on these sites, one must of
course irst ask what, if anything, they are rep-
resentative of. As discussed above, it is impos-
sible to gauge how many single-object sacri-
ices we have from the two provinces in ques-
tion: many of the de-contextualised dry-envi-
ronment bronzes in the museum stores may
have been found at settlements and in graves.
Furthermore, some were most likely once part
of multi-object deposits. Focusing on deinite
multi-object bronze deposits including accu-
mulated assemblages, I know of 32 sites: 17
in Uppland and 15 in Sdermanland. The six
multi-object sites I have visited thus represent
only 19% of the total. But if we look separately
at the subset of multi-object deposits that can
be pinpointed to an individual plot of land or
better, that is, sites with a known landscape lo-
cation that we might point to and visit, the ratio
is closer to 29%.
As expected, the people under study here
primarily sought out wet sites for their sacri-
ices. The two hilltop deposits in Vrdinge par-
Fig. 1. Cave in Pukberget, sterunda parish, Uppland. A per. VVI spearhead and a horse tooth have been found
on rock shelves inside.
164
MARTIN RUNDKVIST
ish are particularly eloquent: they were put in
high places, but in bogs up there (which con-
tradicts Birgitta Johansens 1993 wet vs. high
dichotomous model). Yet as the title of this pa-
per suggests, it also emerges that Bronze Age
people had a strong predilection for landscape
locations that a modern visitor would ind dra-
matic, scenic, even grandiose or sublime.
In their-pre-regulation states, the riv-
er-gorge sites of Hyndevadsfallet and
Tckhammarsbro would have called to mind
Coleridges deep romantic chasm. Each was a
white-water site at the narrowest point down-
stream from a major lake system (Bklin 1961:
27; Damell 1999; Zachrisson 2004). And
they were deep as measured in time as well.
Sacriices had begun there in the Middle or
Late Neolithic and continued at both sites up
into the 17th century.
The Pukberget cave deposit is to my knowl-
edge unique in the region, having been found
inside a jumble of enormous stone blocks from
a collapsed cliff side (ig. 1). A more sublime
location is hard to come by: the sites name
means Devils Hill, and it has probably
born it since the Middle Ages. (In 1946, Erik
Floderus inevitably envisioned a link between
the spearhead from the cave and Odin, though
no sign has been found of any Iron Age activ-
ity at the cave.) A similar association between
spearheads and the interior of hills can be seen
in a ind from a crevice on Oxeberget Hill near
Frndesta in Helgesta, Sdermanland (SHM
21687).
Yet there is also a major ind from a dry
domestic site: Lilla Hrnevi (Forsgren 2007;
2008). When interpreting this deposits land-
scape location, however, we must keep in mind
that it is extremely late in the Bronze Age, per.
VI. Most of Lilla Hrnevi hamlets many set-
tlement-indicating burnt mounds were in all
likelihood completed and abandoned centuries
before the bronzes were buried. One has been
excavated, its accumulation dated with radio-
carbon to a short period about 900 cal BC,
per. IVV (Karlenby 1998: 2728). The burnt
mounds are still visually prominent today,
the plough soil around the hamlet rich in ire-
cracked stone and quartz. It looks as if people
returned to the ruins of a storied ancient settle-
ment site and buried their last multi-period col-
lection of mixed bronzes there, right about the
time when society left the Bronze Age behind
and moved on. At the time, the hoard site was
about a kilometre from the receding seashore,
which is farther than expected for an inhabited
site of the time. The Hjortsberga torque de-
posit in Vrdinge, while also quite near burnt
mounds, has a different relationship to the set-
tlement site, being above and beyond the shore
zone where the burnt mounds and graves are.
I discovered a cupmark boulder among them.
Note also that though my current work tar-
gets dedicated sacriicial sites, there is consid-
erable evidence for less ostentatious sacriices
at settlements as well (Borna-Ahl kvist 2002).
A few are quite opulent. For example, a wet-
patina inely decorated per. I sword pommel
was found between a coeval house foundation
and a cupmark boulder at Sommarnge skog
in Viksta, Uppland (Forsman & Victor 2007).
The pommel, however, is an exception. We
certainly do not see anything like the Lilla
Hrnevi deposit even at major well-excavated
settlements such as Hallunda in Botkyrka,
Apalle in vergran or Pryssgrden in stra
Eneby (Jaanusson 1981; Ulln 1997; Borna-
Ahl kvist 2002).
The Swedish sites discussed above dem-
onstrate the attractiveness of wet, high, topo-
graphically dramatic and ancestral locations
to Bronze Age sacriices. Let me inally point
out another class of sacriicial site that, like the
wet locations, is also well known from other
periods than the Bronze Age. To my knowl-
edge, at least ive dry deposits from Uppland
and Sdermanland were found under or in
contact with eye-catching boulders. Four of
them are multi-object deposits, including
the great hoard from near Spelvik church in
Sdermanland (SHM 813), and these are rare.
It has been argued, irrefutably, that such a lo-
cation with a prominent and durable marker
would make it easy to retrieve the objects. Yet
the fact remains that these deposits were never
retrieved.
1
6
5
G
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S
w/d Location Contents, date Distance
from burnt
mound
(km)
Distance
from
rock art
(km)
Distance
from
coeval
seashore
(km)
Ref
Lngbro in Vrdinge, S Wet Small bog on top of
glacial esker
21 various bronzes,
1 hone stone; single
deposition, per. VI
0.9 1.6 1.4 SHM 2674, 2842
Hjortsberga in Vrdinge, S Wet Small bog on top of
moraine hill, 1900 m
from the above find
1 Wendelring
torque, per. VI
0.3 0.3 0.4 Ra 59; SHM 13117
Tckhammarsbro in Brbo, S Wet River Nykpingsn in
a gorge where it exits
Lake Lnghalsen,
originally with rapids
5 axes, 2 spears, 1
sword; repeated
depositions, per. I,
II, IV
2.6 1.3 2.4 Ra 80, 85; SHM 2273,
4177, 22228; Strngns
1085, M156
Kristineholm in Helgona, S Wet River Nykpingsn
1400 m downstream
from the above finds
1 axe, socketed 1.2 1.0 1.0 Ra 173; Nykping 266
Hyndevadsfallet in Eskilstuna, S Wet River Eskilstunan in a
gorge originally
immediately below a
waterfall
7 various bronzes,
repeated
depositions, per. I,
II, IV, V
1.3 1.4 2.4 Ra 587; SHM 8234:15,
13671, rebro 3608;
Damell 1999; Zachrisson
2004
Klby in Eskilstuna, S Wet Small bog, 900 m from
the above find
2 axes, possibly a
dagger, single
deposition, per.
II/III
0.5 1.5 1.5 Ra 558; SHM 3573,
6759; Beckman-Thoor
2002
Domta vad in sterunda, Up Wet Large fen through
which floats the
Nystrabcken stream
2 belt cupolas, 3
rings, single
deposition, per. V
7.0 2.1 1.8 Ra 83; Uppsala 5690;
Arwidsson 1939
Pukberget in sterunda, Up Dry Cave on cliff side,
1300 m from the above
find
1 spear, per. V-VI, 1
horse tooth
6.2 2.5 3.2 Ra 62; SHM 23674;
Floderus 1946
Lilla Hrnevi in Hrnevi, Up Dry Outskirts of major BA
settlement
C. 50 various
bronzes, 1 leather
garment, single
deposition, per. VI
<0.1 0.4 1.0 Ra 69; SHM 11635,
12607:5, 16120

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.

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e
.
166
MARTIN RUNDKVIST
Distances
Addressing the relationship between the nine
studied sites and neighbouring rock art and
settlement sites (cf. tab. 1) is complicated
due to uncertain data coverage. Finding rock
art is a time-consuming specialised task: any
distribution map will always say something
about where skilled surveyors have been in
addition to about where the rock art is. Still,
it is worth noting that the distance between
sacriicial site and rock art correlates with the
distance between sacriicial site and seashore.
This suggests that either a) surveyors have
preferred to look for rock art near the Bronze
Age sea shore, or b) the data coverage for rock
art is roughly even across the region. As for the
settlement sites, indicated by burnt mounds, it
appears that the surveyors of the Swedish sites
and monuments register were highly skilled
at identifying them when situated alone or in
groups. But picking out a burnt mound or two
at a Bronze Age settlement site that has become
overlaid by one of the regions ubiquitous Late
Iron Age mound cemeteries is of course vastly
harder.
Looking at our little data set, it is
worth noting that the median distances from
sacriicial site to burnt mound, rock art and
seashore are almost the same: 1.2 km, 1.4 km
and 1.5 km. This not because the three have
any tendency to close co-location at the stud-
ied sites. Instead I would suggest that when
people selected a sacriicial site, it had to be
part of the same contiguous sightlined land-
scape room as their home, but not be located
too close to the other three categories. To some
extent this would happen automatically since
neither burnt mounds, rock art nor the seashore
can exist in the freshwater wetland locations
favoured for sacriice.
If with a larger database we can con-
irm that known sacriicial sites do indeed pre-
fer a location 1.21.5 km from burnt mounds,
rock art and the coeval seashore, then the ques-
tion we must ask is, to what extent does it work
the other way around? There are many wetland
locations that fulil those criteria. In most cases
we have no idea what is hidden there. Would
it really be necessary to drain and trial-trench
tens or hundreds of wetlands to ind an an-
swer?
Conclusions
The work in progress I have outlined in this
paper concerns landscape studies of Bronze
Age sacriicial sites in the Lake Mlaren
provinces of Sweden. The projects goals are
twofold: a) to understand the landscape rules
behind the siting of deposits, and thereby b)
to develop a predictive model that allows
scholars to ind undisturbed Bronze Age
deposits without the aid of farmers, dredgers
or ditch diggers.
At the moment of writing, I have
looked at sites in Uppland and Sdermanland
provinces. (Vstmanland and Nrke are also
on my agenda, though inds are more scarce
there.) After closer study of nine sites in the
ield and numerous ones in the archives, I have
found that the Bronze Age people under study
preferred to make sacriices at wet, high, topo-
graphically dramatic and ancestral locations.
There are inds from bogs and white-water riv-
er gorges, hilltops, a cave and a settlement-site
that had once been important. In the rare dry-
land deposit locations, eye-catching boulders
were sought out.
Known sacriicial sites appear to pre-
fer a location 1.21.5 km from settlement-in-
dicating burnt mounds, rock art and the coeval
seashore. This means that sacriicial sites are
typically part of the same contiguous sight-
lined landscape room as the home settlement
of the people who frequented them.
*
A shorter version in Swedish of this paper
has been published as Rundkvist 2011.
167
GODS OF HIGH PLACES AND DEEP ROMANTIC CHASMS
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