The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  Rather than a community of work, it is more usual to talk of the division of labour, by which is meant the allocation by gender of different tasks within the household. Women and men complemented one another. A compilation of ethnographical data from many different societies aside from Western, urban, industrial culture shows that the division of labour follows certain general patterns: hunting and fishing is for men, gathering is for women; the cultivation of the land is men’s work from tree clearance to sowing, and then women’s up to the harvest; men tend the herds of cattle and slaughter them when the moment comes, women care for smaller animals, the milking, and the dairying; men build houses and work with hard materials and hides, the women with soft materials such as wool, osier, bast, and clay; women cook over fires of wood they have gathered, but that have been lit by men. The variations are considerable, however, and this pattern should not be thought of as a set of hard and fast rules, but with that in mind it can still be interesting to refer to them when studying archaeological sites.

  The archaeological method for studying the division of labour by gender is to correlate tools found in single graves with sex-determined skeletal remains. Sex-determined skeletons in individual graves have been found from the Battle-Axe Culture of the Late Middle Neolithic and in graves with cremated skeletons from the Late Bronze Age, but otherwise there are few opportunities to relate tools to sex-determined individuals. Tools have also been found in graves where, although the gender of the remains cannot be determined, there are gender-characteristic objects such as men’s swords and women’s bronze-trimmed cord skirts in the Bronze Age, or men’s battle-axes in the Battle-Axe Culture of the Late Middle Neolithic.

  Some of the agricultural work can be gender-determined with the help of the tools found in graves. Soil preparation, according to the ethnographical pattern, is men’s work. Sure enough, horn hoes, which were perhaps both digging-sticks and mattocks, were in the Battle-Axe Culture only placed in men’s graves. Similarly, all the surviving petroglyphs of ard-ploughing show men behind the ards. Sickles are one of the more usual grave-goods. In the Late Middle Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, they were for the most part placed in men’s graves, yet by the Late Bronze Age they were just as likely to be placed in women’s graves as men’s. The conclusion is that periodically the harvest was predominantly male work, while in other periods it was a joint effort by women and men; yet the question remains whether grave-goods really lend themselves to so uncomplicated a reading. One sickle was found in the grave of a 9- or 10-year-old child. In many low-technology agricultural societies, children take part in the daily work on the farm, starting with simpler tasks from the age of five or so, and gradually growing into an adult role. Whether this was true of Scandinavia in the Neolithic and Bronze Age is unknown.

  The bones of cattle are only found in men’s graves from the Late Middle Neolithic and Late Bronze Age, and the same is true of sheep and goat bones in the Late Middle Neolithic, yet sheep and goats are the only domesticated animals to be found in women’s graves from the Late Bronze Age. These findings point in the same direction as the ethnographical findings. Cattle were men’s business in the Late Middle Neolithic, and come the Late Bronze Age this was still the case, whereas sheep and goats were women’s work. In a Late Bronze Age grave, an earthenware strainer for cheese-making was found with a piece of neck-ring, perhaps indicating that it was a woman’s grave. It should be noted that, though in all ages and places corn has invariably been ground by the women of the household, or in some societies by slaves, the archaeological remains have nothing to say on the matter.

  The ethnographical patterns, together with the limited and problematic evidence of grave-goods, give a picture of men who worked the fields and tended the cattle, and women who worked closer to the house and with food. This is perhaps not surprising, but it is a picture that lacks variation and nuance. The discussion continues.8

  Thinking agriculturally

  Agriculture is in essence the re-creation of the fundamentals of life. Likewise, it is a constant cycle of repetitions. The business of agriculture –the work, and how that work is shared–is ultimately to preserve life and society. In agricultural societies in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, agriculture shaped society and individual patterns of life–and ideologies.

  All these societies were illiterate. Their own history and sense of community resided in stories: tales and myths about the origins of humankind, about how people were given agriculture, and about why agriculture, life, and the world prevailed; but also stories in the form of ritualized actions, of sacrifice, cult, and ceremony, the visible stories that by constant repetition ensured that the world would endure. Agriculture belonged to the world of ideas that made life comprehensible to the people of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and that equipped them to ensure that it would continue in like fashion. Something of this vision can be found in the archaeological remains.

  Tales or myths existed to explain the course of life; why year after year the fields yielded harvests and the livestock bore calves, kids, and piglets. Agriculture was not production; it was reproduction. Life was continuously to be recreated. Time revolved. The rhythm of each day and the course of the year was set by sowing and harvest, procreation and birth, and time told equally on agriculture’s people, who were born and died, generation after generation. In their mind’s eye, all was continuous repetition. Change was a striving to remain the same, a striving to guarantee the march of time and life itself. Agriculture’s people in the Neolithic and Bronze Age had to explain the passage of days, years, and life–the constant re-creation of the fundamentals of life–and safeguard the circumvolution of time and existence.

  In this perspective the thousands of flint and bronze sickles from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age found far and wide in today’s farming districts become more explicable. They were placed singly or in groups. Several revealing sites show that the sickles were placed vertically or were stacked much like roof-tiles, and at one they were found wrapped in birch bark. The general similarity between all the sites is striking.

  Burying sickles in the ground was like sowing corn, for from them would grow the life that would be harvested–with sickles. Sacrifices or magical performances made up the rituals that surrounded sowing and harvest, and the placing of sickles in the ground was part of the yearly cycle, as much an explanation of the mysteries of seed and harvest as were the myths, cult ceremonies, and work; and while there was a time and place for each, yet they remained the same, time and time again.

  The basis of re-creation in agriculture is fertility, and the basis for fertility is the encounter between female and male. Sexuality, fertility, and reproduction are the foundations of life, agriculture, and society. In the agricultural societies of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, it was within the ambit of the household that female and male came together; within a household shaped by the division of labour in which male and female met and complemented each other, and so safeguarded the reproduction of the household, society, and life itself. The world would live on as long as the animals, the fields, and the household were fruitful. This for them was the self-evident reason why agriculture worked, and had to work. At the same time it was infinitely complicated, for how to explain, and how to ensure, continuous re-creation?

  The petroglyphs show the sexuality between women and men, but also between fields and men, and between men and animals. It is of less importance whether these are depictions of actual Bronze Age cult ceremonies, or whether they are illustrations of myths of gods and heroes creating and recreating the world through sexuality. What they do show are people’s thoughts on sexuality and fertility, on how female and male meet and recreate life. It is not a stretch to read the petroglyphs as showing that it is the male element that embodies action, while the female element–fields, livestock, and the women–passively receives life. After all, agricultural tools are much more in evidence in men’s graves than in women’s. It is here that issues such as gender roles, prestige, and
status enter the picture.

  Ritual

  Of all the recurrent actions of a ritual nature, those that are most readily visible are sacrifices. For the Neolithic alone there are some 1,300 known sacrificial sites in Skåne, and the numbers for the entire country and for the Bronze Age are unknown. Sacrificial sites exist throughout the country, wherever there was agriculture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The sacrificial offerings were placed at the fringes of wetlands, on the bottom of streams and rivers, in damp hollows, beside large rocks. The sacrificial sites were equipped with narrow walkways, wooden piles, and platforms of logs or branches that made it possible to walk out into the wetland and place the objects, often fully visible on the surface of the peatbogs or in shallow water. Animal bones, charcoal, and the burnt remains of wooden objects, human bones, and skulls are a sign that there were ceremonies and festivities, not merely an unadorned sacrifice. At other, dryer locations the sites were made to stand out by framing them with palisades, ditches, or stone walls.

  The sacrificial sites from the early part of the Early Neolithic period contain single objects, at most a handful; the remains, it seems, of a single farm’s offerings, placed over the course of one or two generations, before the farm was moved and a new wetland was selected for its sacrifices. Starting in the Late Early Neolithic, sacrificial sites began to appear that were to have numerous objects placed in them over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years, a number of which sites seem to have been shared by several farms.

  The custom of making sacrifices in wetlands remained fairly constant throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age; it was the objects sacrificed that varied. During the Early and Middle Neolithic, the sacrifice of choice was an axe; in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, sickles were more usual. The axes chime with the ring-barked and pollarded trees in the coppiced woodlands that were the basis of agriculture in the Early and Middle Neolithic; the sickles with the harvesting of fields of grain and the gathering of fodder for farms with the storage space of the large long-houses of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

  Sacrifices were also made on the farms themselves, close to the long-houses. In the Early and Middle Neolithic, offerings were placed in pits, often after the objects had been burnt. In the Late Neolithic it became customary to place the offerings inside the long-houses, in the holes for the corner-posts and the posts holding up the roof. In one posthole in a house found at the archaeological site at Fosie in Skåne was a flint sickle; at Västra Skrävlinge, also in Skåne, a posthole contained three flint axes arranged in a triangle with the blades uppermost, with a fourth axe laid across the top.

  The changes in sacrificial customs in the Late Neolithic indicate that the households’ ideas about agriculture, life, the annual cycle, and the world’s continued existence now more than before centred on the long-house and the household, the harvest and livestock. This is even more apparent in the Bronze Age, when images of people, livestock, and sexuality were chipped into the rock faces. At Apalle in Uppland the jawbones and skulls of domestic animals were found arranged along the walls of long-houses from the Late Bronze Age, the various kinds laid in different places along the walls or at the thresholds of different rooms. Here people lived and worked surrounded by the heads of their slaughtered animals. Where refuse was collected in mounds of fire-cracked stones, a circle of cow, bull, horse, pig, sheep, and goat skulls was carefully arranged around the foot of the heap, while the cooked and split marrow bones were thrown on it. Livestock were tended, fed, milked, slaughtered, depicted in petroglyphs, and placed in the farm’s buildings and around its enclosure in ritualized patterns; alive and dead, they were a constant presence in people’s lives and thoughts. They were work, food, and myth. Above all, they were the constant re-creation of life, and thus also of death.

  Life and death

  Agriculture is life, but by the same token, it is death. It is also a metaphor of life and death. However, it is not death as annihilation. Instead, it is death as cessation, part of the constant, seasonal round of sowing–harvest–seed-corn, sowing–harvest–seed-corn. The rhythm of each day or year, even of human life, is one of re-creation and return.

  Figure 1.4 The Bronze Age world of ideas, carved in rock? Arable land, livestock, and life itself created in the union of male and female. Petroglyphs (rockcarvings) from Sten-backen and Vitlycke, Bohuslän and Sagaholm, Småland.

  Occasionally, there are ard marks under Early Bronze Age burial-mounds in Skåne and Halland. Whether the ground was ritually ploughed because a burial-mound was about to be erected there, or whether the burial-mound was placed in a field that had sustained the dead during their lifetime is a moot point. The burial-mound itself was made from turf from the pastures that gave the livestock life; it rested on and contained agriculture as death and life. Sometimes sickles were placed in the burial-mounds, or quernstones at the outer edges of the mounds or amongst the stones in the barrow itself. At a site at Östra Vrå in Södermanland from the Late Early Neolithic, some eighty quernstones were placed over two pits containing dead children. As we have seen, grave-goods are often used as an indication of the occupations of the dead during the deceased’s lifetime. This may be an accurate assumption, but it may equally be the case that the tools were meant as a reminder of death’s place in the cycle of life.

  The drama of life and death was played out within the household, where female and male met in a community of work and in sexuality. The household was the long-house; it was the food cooked over fires in the cooking pits outside or at the hearth inside. Prehistoric people thought in associative patterns, in objects and actions. Life and death, the long-house and the hearth; all were crystallized in the mortuary house, the house built for the dead in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In the mortuary house at Turinge in Södermanland, which dates from the Late Middle Neolithic, cremated human remains were found in the wall foundations, along with earthenware pots, animal bones, and axes. It all gives an intentional picture of the complex ideas about life, death, hearth and home, fire, harvest, and food in the Battle-Axe Culture.

  Fire was the very essence of life. It meant a warm long-house in winter, and cooked food, and the fired earthenware pots to contain it. In the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, the shattered stones from the hearths and from cooking and brewing were collected outside the long-houses in mounds of fire-cracked stones, with the general household refuse and waste from the slaughter, leaving for posterity a picture of the household and the fire, and therefore of life and the re-creation of life. Beginning in the Later Bronze Age it became usual to cremate the dead. Sometimes the remains were buried in the mounds of fire-cracked stones, but more often the bones were placed in one of the household’s earthenware pots, occasionally even a pot shaped like a house. The barrows where the earthenware pots have been found look the same as the fields’ clearance cairns. When a long-house was moved to a new location, its refuse was ploughed into the fields.

  Life and death, long-houses and graves, households and agriculture –all were interwoven at these archaeological sites, an extension of how people thought about the existence and re-creation of everything around them, about the course of time, and about the encounter of female and male in the sphere of the household.

  Households were not only groups of people who created, stored, and prepared food together. They also ate as a group. In the Late Early Neolithic and the Early Middle Neolithic, earthenware pots containing food were placed out in wetlands; in the Early Middle Neolithic, they were placed at the thresholds to the dolmens and passage-graves where the bones of the dead lay piled up in the house-like stone rooms; in the Late Bronze Age, wooden vessels and earthenware pots of grain and other food were placed in the stone-walled chamber on a hilltop above Odensala Prästgård in Uppland. The food in all these offerings was a gift from the people to the gods or the powers. Conversely, all food was a gift from the gods or powers to people.

  Food was a priority in the household, and between the household an
d the gods or powers. To take a meal together was a religious act, and a moment when people came together. The attitudes towards the division of labour and ritualized gender roles meant that the internally complementary pairing of female–male is all too easily thought of as corresponding to pairings such as inside–outside and passive–active. Yet it was women who organized, prepared, and shared out the food, and it was women who thus gave the gift of food within the household. Expressed as simple opposites, passive–active could be replaced by give–do: women give–men do. Women were the nexus, for not only did they literally give life, they sustained life with the gift of food. Farming was a means to an end–food–and the shared meal is the essence of agriculture.

  The rituals of agriculture

  Ulrika Stenbäck Lönnquist & Stig Welinder

  UNTIL THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, to farm the land and raise livestock was to bring order to the rhythm of the days, the turning of the years, the cycle of life, to crops, animals, and the household, using implements and experience – and rituals. The early farming households in the long-houses of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, 3000–500 BC, created a ritualized pattern of life that assured them the continuation of life, acting in concert with the relevant powers. In the larger, more hierarchical societies of the Iron Age, 500 BC–AD 1000, households used the same traditional rituals and added new ones, which in part had been created in response, and opposition, to the Roman Empire.

  Returning mercenaries from the Roman army baked bread from flour that had been ground in rotary querns, a novelty in the German societies of the third century AD. The querns produced the bread of life by turning, like the day and the year; turning on an axle that stood upright like the celestial axis. At first, bread was prestige and cosmology. It was to be found on the great men’s farms, at cult sites, and in men’s graves. Great men and chieftains built halls that imitated the audience chambers of the Roman emperors and officials. Small gold-foil plaques were fastened on the roof-posts and placed in the postholes; tokens stamped with mythical images of the chieftain-couple in life-giving embrace, an assurance to all the chieftain’s followers of good harvests and continued life.