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Once
the glaciers receded following the last Ice Age, new land appeared, and new coastline.
Game animals on land—moose, elk, reindeer, musk ox, mammoth, deer, wild boar—and
sea—fish, seals, whales, otters, shellfish—attracted Stone Age man into new
regions of land across northern Europe and into Scandinavia.
The earliest hunters and gatherers entered the
region more than 10,000 years ago but left scant evidence of their presence. The weather
continued to warm, and the ice and snow continued to recede. Stone Age man found plentiful
food and was drawn further north along the coasts and into the Scandinavian interior. Life
for these people on the edge of the survivable world was brutish and short, and fraught
with mystery and danger.
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THIS ARTICLE
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North and South:
Fire, boats and stone tools enabled these
daring peoples to survive the great test of the north. The northern hunter/gatherers
followed the herds and the salmon runs, moving south during the winters, moving north
again during the summers. They followed cultural traditions practiced throughout the far
north—Finland, Russia, and across the Bering Straits into Alaska and Canada. |
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In southern Scandinavia conditions grew favorable to encourage |
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Bronze
Age Lur
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and support agriculture. By about 1500 BC in Denmark, southern
Sweden, and southern Norway, temperatures warmed to levels similar to today’s
Mediterranean climate. Farming guaranteed an annual food supply without migration and
created a social stability that enabled a complex structured society to emerge. Farming
required advanced tools and knowledge, and both came from neighbors further to the south
on the European continent. Trade with these older, more advanced, southern European
societies brought the lower Scandinavians many innovations, perhaps especially, by 1500
BC, bronze, and 1,000 years later, iron.
Throughout heavily wooded Scandinavia
there was little need to build out of any but organic materials. Little
evidence remains of the Scandinavia of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or
the Iron Age except tools of stone, bronze, and iron, some jewelry and
ornament, stone burial cairns, and, most remarkably, a widespread and
rich collection of stone drawings we call "rock carvings".
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Today, throughout Scandinavia visitors can
explore the early |
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years of human prehistory
in the region thanks to the careful collecting, restoring, maintaining,
and re-creating of important sites and finds from the Stone, Bronze, and
Iron Ages. |
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PREHISTORIC MILESTONES IN SCANDINAVIA:
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9000-8000 BC Earliest human
settlement in Scandinavia
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8000-4000 BC Old Stone Age: hunters
& fishermen, first rock carvings
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4000-1500 BC New Stone Age: early
agriculture, livestock
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1500-500 BC Bronze Age:
agricultural tools, jewelry, glass, weapons
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500 BC-800 AD Iron Age: iron plows and
scythes
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800–1050 AD Viking Age |
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Denmark:
In
Denmark, great
troves of flint and bronze and iron tools and weapons have been found. The National Museum
in Copenhagen displays a superb collection of weapons and implements of
flint—arrowheads, axes, swords and much more—crafted and used in the everyday
life of the peoples of Stone Age Denmark from around 10,000 to 1,500 BC. |
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Bronze came to Denmark around 1,500 BC,
imported from southern Europe. The National Museum exhibits a priceless grouping of
weapons, ornaments and sacrificial offerings from the Bronze Age. The
collection’s masterpiece is the Sun Chariot—made around 1,500 BC—a circular
disk partially gilded, representing the life-giving sun, drawn by a bronze horse. Near the
Sun Chariot in the National Museum are the lurs, which also date from the Bronze
Age and are the world’s oldest musical instruments: gracefully curved bronze horns,
six feet long from mouthpiece to funnel. A total of 31 lurs have been found.
Many are so |
The chariot of the sun. 14th century BC.
Trundholm, Denmark. Bronze and gold
© Photo: National Museum, Copenhagen
– Kit Weiss
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well preserved that they
can still be used to play fanfares on festive occasions. |
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The Iron Age arrived in Denmark at about 500
BC. More effective implements to cultivate land were thereby created, and rural
settlements came into existence. Iron provided for more and stronger weapons, inspiring
the Danes of that time to take up warfare, leading ultimately to the Danish Viking
invasions to England and Normandy. |
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The Far North of Norway:
Even the very far north of Scandinavia was
eventually inhabited by pre-historic man, who left his mark in rock carvings and rock
paintings much like early settlers 800 miles to the south. The petroglyphs in the Alta
Fjord by the Norwegian Sea not far from
Norway's North Cape
(northernmost point on the European continent) are from a settlement that existed during
the Stone Age: 4200-500 BC. Since 1985 the Alta Fjord site, with its paintings and
thousands of engravings, has been on the protected World Heritage Sites list. Visitors can
visit the site, midway between Tromsø and Hammerfest on route E6.
In the north people existed in
small bands that moved around over large territories, not unlike nomadic
Inuit peoples |
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today. They lived mainly
from hunting and fishing with moose, |
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seal and salmon probably
providing their most important food sources. Because of their migratory
life-style—moving seasonally from one camp to another—they constructed
smaller tents that could easily be transported between their different
camping grounds. They left few permanent reminders of their existence: a
few stone cairns, stone tools, and rock drawings. |
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Southern Sweden:
Although prehistoric Denmark was probably
richer in metals, tools, and the |
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complexities of civilization, no place in Scandinavia has a |
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Bronze Age Cairn
near Rossö, Sweden.
Photo
© Home At First. |
greater abundance of prehistoric sites than does the lower third of
Sweden. Found along both coasts and deep into its interior, Sweden’s
multitude of sites contributes much to our knowledge of the Stone,
Bronze, and Iron Ages in Northern Europe.
Typical finds in southern
Sweden are burial mounds (earthworks) and burial cairns (mounds of
stones), and a wealth of sites with rock drawings/carvings. Some of the rock drawings,
like those of the far north, seem strictly representative of practical concerns: game
animals, fish, weapons, and boats. But such is the number and variety of symbols—both
representative and abstract—that many experts believe the markings to be a kind of
primitive language with magical or religious importance.
The most common type
of rock carving of the southern Bronze Age tradition is the simple cup-mark figure: a
little depression in the rock surface, a few inches wide and less than an inch deep. The
second most common picture is of a ship or boat. Experts debate whether the |
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ship engravings represent real ships, or if they serve to |
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symbolize a concept like birth,
death, or commerce. |
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The southern Swedish provinces of Bohuslän, Scania, Östergötland, and in
the Lake Mälaren Basin are the largest concentrations of rock carving
sites. Here primitive peoples had settled small villages where they
lived primarily by farming and cattle raising. Like Eastern Woodland
Indians or British Celts, these early Swedes built big long-houses with
timber posts and walls made of wattle and mud, and they kept their
fields and pastures around the village.
From around 1300 BC,
the stone-built cairn became the common burial crypt design of the Bronze Age in northern
Europe. Cairns were |
Bronze Age boat & cup marks,
southern Sweden.
Photo
© Home At First.
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built as monuments to honor dead tribal |
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leaders.
Cairns are found along both coasts and the |
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Bronze Age Cairn BOHUSLÄN,
Sweden.
Photo
© Home At First.
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interior of southern Sweden. Large burial mounds of turf are common to
wealthier regions, while stone cairns are found in poorer regions with
less farming potential.
Two hours drive on the E6 north of
Gothenburg
along Sweden’s west coast in the province of Bohuslän is the great complex of rock
carvings known as Tanum, near Tanumshede village, about 3 miles from the sea. Like Alta in
northern Norway, the Tanum site has been named to the World Heritage list. While the site
presents nothing unique, it is the quantity and quality of the rock carvings here that
give Tanum its importance. Visitors can wander throughout the several acres of protected
land seeing thousands of drawings and carvings on |
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exposed rock faces large and small, in fields and in the |
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forest. A trail even leads
to a rock mound burial |
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cairn at the top of the Tanum hill.
Across the road from
the Tanum site is the Vitlycke Museum, completed in 1998. The primary reason for the
museum is to try to explain—via multi-media methods—the many different
interpretations of Tanum's Bronze Age carving/drawings. Behind the Vitlycke Museum is a
reconstructed living Bronze Age Farm, where visitors have an opportunity to enter
primitive long-houses, and observe Bronze Age technology and agriculture.
More sites are being discovered all
the time. Saturday, June 16, 2001, will see the start |
WORLD HERITAGE ROCK DRAWINGS AT
TANUM, SWEDEN.
Photo
© Home At First. |
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of the Bovigården Bronze
Age Center at the Folk |
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Museum of Boarp, just outside Båstad, north of |
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Malmö at the Swedish provincial border of Skåne and Halland. The focus
of the center is a 60’ x 30’
long-house based on Bronze Age house remains found in Halland. Just as
in Tanum, the Bovigården Bronze Age Center will be a living museum with
hands-on displays, live animals, gardens, technology and agriculture.
Vitlycke
Museum Bronze Age Farm, Sweden.
Photo
© Home At First. |
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You can visit all
kinds of destinations as easy day trips
from Home At First lodgings
throughout Scandinavia.
Our exclusive "Activities Guides" have hundreds
of pages of suggestions for things to see and
do when you travel with Home At First
to:
SCANDINAVIA.
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HOME AT FIRST
offers travel to many
great destinations in
SWEDEN,
NORWAY, & DENMARK
using friendly inns and
small hotels. Mix and match destinations to create the Scandinavian
trip of your dreams. For complete information about travel
with
HOME AT FIRST
to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, see:
SCANDINAVIA.
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