Paths Towards a New World: Neolithic Sweden

Covering the approximately 6,500 years from the beginning of the Late Mesolithic to the transition to the Bronze Age, Mats Larsson takes the reader on a journey through the development of Swedish prehistoric society and culture set against the backdrop of climatic and landscape change. Using examples selected from a wealth of archaeological sites, artefacts and palaeo-environmental studies he explores a series of chronological themes: such as how the relationship between land and water influenced people’s lives in many ways and the development of often long-distance cultural and exchange networks, as reflected in the occurrence of ‘foreign’ stone axes, flint, copper and pottery. He describes how innovations, such as the introduction of agriculture, spread rapidly during the Neolithic, incorporating characteristics of extensive northern European cultural groups, beginning with the Funnel Beaker Culture with its array of distinctive objects, settlements and burial monuments, while retaining some specific regional and local expressions in material culture. Later, certain characteristics of the Pitted Ware Culture, such as specific types of pottery decoration, were taken up in some areas while the emergence of some regional groups can be seen as a step in the ideological and social changes that led to what we today call the Battle Axe Culture. Towards the end of the Stone Age the battle axe was replaced by the dagger as a symbol of the male warrior as a more stable society emerged in many parts of the country, concentrated around large farms with longhouses. It was only at this late stage that agriculture and the raising of livestock gained a firm hold, and the landscape was opened up permanently.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 – Environmental history (Geoffrey Lemdahl)
Chapter 2 – The Mesolithic Period and Stone Age hunters
Chapter 3 – From hunter to farmer
Chapter 4 – The dead and the afterlife
Chapter 5 – Science and the Neolithic (Kerstin Lidén)
Chapter 6 – A time of change
Chapter 7 – New manners and customs
Chapter 8 – Longhouses and stone cists
Epilogue
References
Index

Mats Larsson is Professor of Archaeology at Linnaeus University in Kalmar/Växjö in Sweden. He studied in Lund and wrote his dissertation on the Early Neolithic of southernmost Sweden. This is a theme he has developed over the years in books and articles. His other main interest is the late part of the Middle Neolithic in Sweden. Over the years he has cooperated with leading British Archaeologists including Julian Thomas, Mike Parker-Pearson and Richard Bradley.



Kerstin Lidén is a Professor in Archaeological Science with a special interest in Environmental Humanities. She has been part in initiating a special call for a post doc researchers in “Environmental Research in the Human Sciences Area” at Stockholm University, an interdisciplinary call directed to all areas in Human Sciences. Kerstin has also initiated a new field of research in Sweden, Glacial Archaeology, where she and her research group perform regular inventories at melting glaciers and snow patches. Presently she is also leading a research project on “How to deal with environmental change – the impact of three major environmental events on prehistoric coastal societies and their main prey species” focusing on human environmental relations in times of major climatic shifts, natural or human induced.