The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  The first of agriculture’s ecofacts–charred grain and the bones of domesticated animals–are found together with Funnel-Beaker pottery, and thus the rise of Funnel-Beaker Culture marked the advent of substitution, the second stage. The first stage had by then lasted at least a thousand years, with its associated archaeological culture named for Ertebølle, an archaeological site in Jutland, of which there are finds in Sweden in Skåne, Blekinge, and southern Halland. Ertebølle Culture ceramics were fired at lower temperatures, have thicker walls, and are less varied in shape and more sparsely decorated than the pottery of Funnel-Beaker Culture. The two kinds of ceramic can be used to distinguish between older and more recent modes of life during the pivotal period of 4000–3800 BC. Equivalent changes had taken place in northern Poland and Germany some 500–600 years before.

  There are two schools of thought on how the two pottery styles and ways of life succeeded one another over time. By contrasting the detailed dating of sites where only Ertebølle ceramics are found with those with only Funnel-Beaker ceramics, it seems that the former existed until 3800 BC, while deposits of the latter began in 3900 BC. One lifestyle might very well have replaced the other in less than 50–100 years; a matter of two or three generations of people taking a vital decision. Yet equally, sites where both kinds of pottery have been found can be used to argue that they were in use at the same time, at which point, instead of a sudden break, the change in lifestyle appears as a process that spanned up to ten or twelve generations over the course of 250–300 years. The chronological problems remain to be solved.

  The greatest problem faces those who advocate the latter view, for it requires that the people of the older lifestyle lived generation after generation knowing of agriculture but not adopting it. Are agricultural ecofacts ever found in conjunction with Ertebølle Culture finds? Actually, the answer is yes, for three Ertebølle potsherds from Skåne show the impressions of grain. All three were found together with Funnel-Beaker potsherds, but it is not possible to determine whether the Ertebølle potsherds ended up in the refuse before or after the first Funnel-Beaker potsherds, although at the problematic site of Siretorp in Blekinge it has been established with a reasonable degree of certainty that the place was used by turns by people who used Ertebølle pottery and people who used Funnel-Beaker pottery.

  The introduction of agriculture to the southernmost areas of the Scandinavian peninsula appears as a complex and as yet poorly understood process. Over the course of several generations, people adopted very new ideas and to varying extents changed their way of life. In central Sweden the process was apparently more straightforward. Archaeological finds of Funnel-Beaker artefacts and of cultivated plant and domestic animal ecofacts have been made in exactly the same terrain as finds from the older fisher–hunter–gatherer tradition. The contrast in material culture, ritual, and lifestyle is immense, and it certainly confuses the issue of whether people from southern Sweden did indeed move to central Sweden, taking with them not only their aspirations but also their domestic animals and seed-corn. A chronological difference between the earliest dates for Funnel-Beaker Culture in Skåne and in central Sweden cannot be proved, however.

  From the composition of finds of ecofacts it would seem that agriculture in the period 1200–800 BC was the wholly dominant way of life as far north as present-day Västergötland and Uppland. Perhaps this had also been true around 2000 BC, but there is insufficient evidence both there and in the areas to the west and north of Lake Vänern. In limited areas of the country, agriculture dominated earlier than this. Further, it should not be thought that agriculture was introduced simultaneously to a large area, let alone to the country as a whole, whereupon it grew gradually in importance. The availability–substitution–consolidation model is a simplification of a reality that is hard to grasp, and in many ways it is more fruitful to consider a different three-stage model of non-linear change.

  Agriculture was introduced in 3900 BC in southern Sweden, as far north as Bohuslän, Västergötland, Närke, Västmanland, and Uppland, and possibly even up to Dalsland and southern Värmland. In form it was relatively similar across the entire region, although with a degree of ecological variation from south to north in terms of the choice of plants cultivated and, more indistinctly, the kind of livestock kept: wheat was more common in the south, barley in the north; and it is possible that sheep and goats were more usual in the north, unlike the south, where cattle and swine dominated.

  After 3300 BC, during the Middle Neolithic, the variations across the agricultural areas of southern Sweden were no longer determined by ecology, but by culture. A variety of archaeological cultures, which in muted fashion equated to people’s various lifestyles, was linked to a variety of kinds of agriculture, with different choices of plants and domesticated animals. In the Funnel-Beaker Culture, wheat and cattle predominated; in the Battle-Axe Culture they grew barley, and possibly kept more sheep and goats than cattle; while in the Pitted Ware Culture, agriculture played a less important role, but they still had herds of pigs. Agriculture did not grow in importance, except in the plains; what it did do was change.

  Then in the Late Bronze Age, from 1100 BC, agriculture once again became similar across the entire region from Skåne to Uppland, although at a guess the levelling out of cultural differences had already begun during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, starting in 2300 BC. The same plants were cultivated and the same animals kept, with only a few small differences between southern and central Sweden. Hunting and fishing diminished in importance as a source of food.

  When it came to agriculture, the boundary that ran across the country that may have been established as long ago as the Early Neolithic seems to have remained in place for the entire period up to and including the Late Bronze Age. The cultivation of barley, but not cattle, has been demonstrated for the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia from the Middle Neolithic. If the conventional model of the introduction of agriculture is applied to the large region north of Uppland, the first step, availability, cannot be said to have ended until 1500–1000 BC, and perhaps even later. This was at least three thousand years later than in Skåne or Västmanland.5

  Changes to farms

  Between the Early Neolithic and the Late Bronze Age, the composition of farms changed in ways that become understandable if they are seen relative to the long-term changes in agriculture summarized in the previous section. The term gård (farm) is a problematic and probably anachronistic term used in prehistoric archaeology. A farm is a piece of ground that has been settled. It is also a group of people, in historical time often centred on a married couple, a nuclear family, or another female–male relationship. The group is independent and self-sufficient. All this being so, it is reasonable to regard a farm as a household.

  In written history, farms are associated with estates, leases, taxes, obligations, and rights; for the prehistoric period, it must be the facts on the ground–the houses and agriculture–that determine how the term ‘farm’ should be used, if at all. A Pitted Ware Culture hut with a group of people tending a herd of pigs does not at first glance seem to be a farm. A Late Bronze Age long-house, possibly with an in-built byre as well as outbuildings, fields, and livestock, does.

  The term ‘farm’ is used here for the Neolithic and Bronze Age to mean a dwelling-house for a group of people for whom agriculture provided a significant part of their livelihood. To qualify, the house must be substantial–a long-house, for example –and the agriculture of sufficient importance that it is a part of the fully agricultural lifestyle discussed in the section on the agricultural mindset (see p. 32). This is couched in deliberately vague terms in order to capture the considerable variations that existed during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. With this approach, the term prehistoric ‘farm’ signifies something very different to the farms later in this book.

  During the Early Neolithic and Early Middle Neolithic, farms generally consisted of a single house, 8–18 metres long. During the Late Neolithic and Early Br
onze Age, farms also consisted of only one house, but it could be double the size, 8–35 metres long. The difference arose from the fact that the kind of agriculture that was not complemented with hunting, fishing, and gathering on a large scale had been established during the Late Neolithic, during what in the three-step model would be consolidation. Agriculture is amongst many things a storage economy, with a pressing need for space to store produce, while fishing, hunting, and gathering are the embodiment of a hand-to-mouth economy. Instead of having different houses in different places for different activities, the households of the Late Neolithic gathered all their activities in a single place–the farm. In the Late Bronze Age, farms had at least two different buildings–a long-house and an outbuilding–and thus several smaller buildings for different purposes replaced a single large one. These long-houses were 9–22 metres long.

  Figure 1.1 It is possible to chart a long-house tradition from the Early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. In the Early Neolithic, households moved seasonally between long-houses and huts. In the Middle Neolithic, Pitted Ware Culture ceramics found in conjunction with huts form a distinct tradition. In the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age the long-houses were larger, while in the Late Bronze Age outbuildings were more common than before. (For abbreviations, see Fig. 1.5.) Source: Welinder 1998, for this and all other figures in this chapter.

  Fig. 1.1 illustrates in simple form the considerable variation within periods and between different parts of the country. To explain why the farms changed in appearance, it is not enough simply to adduce the functional changes in agriculture.6 With the passage of the first millennia of agriculture, small long-houses that were moved around coppiced woodland gave way to larger long-houses, complete with outbuildings, each sited in an enclosure in an open agricultural plain; small fields cleared with mattocks or by rooting pigs, sown with digging-sticks, gave way to cleared, manured, and bounded fields that were ard-ploughed and sown several years in succession; livestock that roamed the coppiced woodlands day and night, year round, gave way to livestock kept in byres and driven considerable distances to summer pastures.

  This picture is more a good guess at how life was lived than a certainty: in places the archaeological evidence is barely sufficient to support it; it is to some extent based on cultural studies and our present understanding of ecology; and in many respects it only holds good for limited areas of the country. It is also freighted with a sense of purposeful development, as well it might in a description of farms and cultivated landscapes that spans three thousand years. The evolutionary element in this picture is real, at least to the extent that each period set the preconditions for the next, but it would be wrong to think that people created their way of life not in response to these preconditions, but to how things might turn out subsequently. Still, it is accurate to say that agriculture and the agrarian landscape changed. What then of the agriculturalists?7

  Figure 1.2 A gender index for various household tasks. A value of a hundred means the work was exclusively male, a value of zero means it was exclusively female. An intermediate value means it was done to a varying degree by both men and women. The figures are based on a study of a large number of ethnographical descriptions of different population groups in various parts of the world (after Murdock & Provost 1973).

  All farmers are in some respects similar. The ecology of the people and the cultivated landscape remains the same. People, however, are individuals, with feelings and ideas–and groups who adhere to norms and traditions. This is what makes people, people; this is why they must be understood as culture. This is in effect to say that all people are different, yet the emphasis here is on how people in the Neolithic and Bronze Age were very different from modern people, and I will not be placing as much weight on the variations over the three thousand years under consideration.

  The crucial element in all this is the household: how it functioned, and why it functioned. When it came to the why and the wherefore, prehistoric people had their own ideas. Of course, they had their own ideas about everything else as well, but here the focus will be on prehistoric views on the household, and more particularly on how the differences between them and us can be better understood if we try to see how prehistoric people explained the course of agriculture and the continuance of the world.

  The household

  Farm, long-house, and household are terms I use more or less interchangeably. Farms and households were groups of people who cooperated in order to live; the people who formed a household lived together in the same long-house, and survived by their joint efforts. Each household was a farm, and was sustained by it for several generations, through a progression of births and deaths. It seems probable that a household consisted of people drawn from three generations: adults, and their parents and children. Yet this is still little more than conjecture, and exactly how the adults were related to one another is still unknown. Archaeological households have a tendency to be houses with stubbornly anonymous inhabitants.

  Since the members of a farm household lived under the same roof, the size of the houses can tell us something of the size of the households. The usual method is to assign each person a certain amount of floor-space based on the formulas arrived at in ethnographical research. Thus in small, single-family houses with a floor area of up to 15 m2 each person is said to have 2–2.5 m2 of space; for floor areas of 15–35 m2 each person has 10 m2; while for large houses over 35 m2 the calculation is based on 6–10 m2 per person. For the prehistoric period, the first formula can be used for huts and the smallest long-houses, the second for the larger long-houses. Mesolithic huts before the advent of agriculture by this reckoning housed 10–12 people. In the Middle Mesolithic, huts were generally somewhat smaller, both in the Pitted Ware Culture and in the hunting and fishing grounds of the Funnel-Beaker Culture and the Battle-Axe Culture–places where people did not live in long-houses, in other words.

  The long-houses of the Early and Middle Neolithic were relatively small, and after a period when they were somewhat larger in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, they were once again small in the Late Bronze Age. A household in the Early or Middle Neolithic seems to have consisted of six or seven people, and it is uncertain whether their number grew at the start of the Late Neolithic as the increase in long-house size might at first glance indicate, for the simple reason that the new kind of agriculture brought with it tasks that required more space indoors. Similarly, it is equally uncertain whether the households shrank in size during the Late Bronze Age compared with the Early Bronze Age, since some of the larger long-houses’ functions moved out into outbuildings. It would seem that throughout the entire Neolithic and Bronze Age, a normal household consisted of some six or seven persons. This conclusion is problematic, and particularly for the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age the possibility must be entertained that households were in fact larger.

  Figure 1.3 The estimated number of inhabitants of different kinds of house in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age.

  In the Early Middle Neolithic, passage-graves were built by households in several regions; in the Late Middle Neolithic, the people of the Battle-Axe Culture buried their dead singly in rows; in some parts of Sweden in the Late Neolithic, each household had its own chambered tomb; while in the Early Bronze Age, groups of mounds were constructed in the south of the country, and cairns in the north on the high ground above the farms. Yet in all this it is unclear how the graves should be related to individual farms and households, or whether all the members of a household were buried in the funerary monuments that are still very much in evidence. The latter was probably the case with grave-fields with single burials in earthenware pots or birch-bark containers in small pits in the Late Bronze Age.

  For all periods, however, there are graves for both women and men, for both children and adults. Men’s graves generally occur more frequently than women’s graves, while children’s graves are far more rare than might be expected from what in all likelihood was a high rate
of infant mortality. There is much to suggest that not all members of a household were buried in the readily visible monuments. However, indications are that the households were made up of a core group of adult women and men.

  Starting with the normal sizes for the households outlined above, they seem to have consisted of some two or three adult women, a similar number of adult men, and between two and four children. A three-generation family with one or more extra people is one possible interpretation, even though it should be borne in mind that it is not self-evident that nuclear families existed in the Stone Age. Whichever the case, the households were built up around a community of work that transcended the boundaries of gender and age.

  The shift from larger to smaller long-houses in about 1000 BC has largely been discussed with a view to understanding household structure. The rich archaeological site at Apalle in Uppland offers the opportunity to test some of these ideas. Here, a number of farms and households existed concurrently for several generations. Before 900 BC, the households cooked their food in large cooking pits, and disposed of their refuse in communal mounds of fire-cracked stones. After 900 BC, they all cooked their food indoors and each household had its own refuse heap. Individual households became more distinct, and more private. At the same time, from having primarily grown emmer wheat, they went over to growing hulled barley. Manured and ard-ploughed fields for hulled barley were a long-term investment, one for which it would be an advantage for a farm to assert private ownership. It could be that the period around 900 BC saw the introduction of what in time would become the family-owned farms of the historical period.

  The division of labour