The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  The agricultural areas of present-day Sweden were Christianized in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Much of the household’s ruminations and ritual actions as to daily life and farming were moved from farm, settlement, burial ground, and land to the church, the mass, and the churchyard. Much of life continued as before. Coins, earthenware pots, and animal remains were deposited under the houses as they were built, but now to an ever-increasing degree inside the houses, not under the walls or the threshold. They were intended to keep the good inside the house, no longer to shut out the bad. Household utensils and farming implements were thrown into Västannortjärn, a lake in Dalarna, between AD 1100 and 1400 in a manner reminiscent of another sacrificial site, Käringsjön in Halland, between AD 200 and 400. Was it a similar expression of the same idea of sacrificing to the powers that bestowed on the household and farming year their unbroken order, or was the same expression found for very different ideas by accident? When the relics of St Erik were translated from the old cathedral in Gamla Uppsala to the new in Uppsala in the thirteenth century, the reliquary was carried in procession across the fields in the same way that the goddess Nerthus, as Tacitus noted in Germania in AD 98, rode in her wagon through the countryside spreading fertility.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the girls who had helped shovel the manure from the farm’s dung pit was tossed onto the last cartload being carried to the fields. She was the Dung Bride, and the cart was driven by the Dung King. In the dung pit stood a maypole, similar to the maypoles raised to this day for Midsummer. At Midsummer, the May Lord fought winter and, victorious, ushered in the new farming year with the May Bride at his side. The manured fields were sown, usually by men, with long, powerful strides so that the corn would grow tall and strong. Flax, which they wanted to grow tall, was sown on days with women’s names, because women had long hair. At sowing-time, the Christmas bread, which had been waiting buried in the seed-bin, was crumbled into the seblet with the seed-corn, now a ‘seblet-cake’ that carried the hope of the one harvest to the next. Seblet-cake could also be given to the horses, buried in the fields, or eaten by the labourers on festive occasions. It was made from a sheaf that had been heavily bound in order to make the next harvest abundant. The kneading-trough would be covered with a pair of man’s trousers, in the same way as a woman’s petticoat was put on the threshold when a new cow was to enter the byre for the first time.

  On many farms the traditional rituals were kept alive, from force of habit and for safety’s sake, right up to the middle of the twentieth century. Then general education, secularization, and the changing nature of agriculture finished them off. But even today there will probably be a horseshoe over the door, ends pointing up so the luck cannot run out. At Rösten in Östergötland, a phallic stone that has stood close by the farm there time out of mind is still cared for and painted. It is said that the farm will sink into the ground if not. Once when they forgot to paint the stone, the barn burned to the ground.

  And of course, there will always be the mumbled, “If God is willing, and the tools don’t break …”

  The eternal household

  This timeless picture of the household and gender roles, and of how the division of labour was ritualized and mythologized, takes its starting-point in general human experience and scant archaeological finds, independent of time and place. Properly speaking, the challenge of prehistoric archaeology is to determine whether and when different types of household–and gender role–existed, and how they changed. In this chapter I have instead concentrated on the unchanging similarities.

  Life expectancy was short in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The generations succeeded one another rapidly. Thus it was not lone individuals who held a household together over a long period of time; it was the community of work and the female and male elements within the group of people who made up the household or farm. Agriculture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age existed within a framework of households that are reminiscent of families. That is still very much the case today, even if the later chapters in this volume nuance the history of recent centuries, but thus far I have argued that change, particularly in the course of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, was secondary to continuity. It might be of interest, however, to trace how agriculture came to leave an increasing mark on cult and ritual. Animals or animal parts were regularly buried together with human remains. It was only from the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age that domesticated animals dominated this particular form of a special relationship with animals. Indeed, in the long perspective this was the era when ritual actions began to be shaped by agriculture.9

  Figure 1.5 The three-step model of the introduction of agriculture to Sweden (see p. 22) reveals the differences in its progress in the southern and central areas of the country.

  Change

  The three-step model of the introduction of agriculture can be used to describe the different rates at which it was introduced in the various parts of the country. Other similar progressions can be followed over the course of the first thousand years of agriculture: crops and livestock; buildings; tools and work; the cultivated landscape; farms and households; food and people. Yet it is not self-evident that one coherent picture can be created from these many strands, nor that the trends that would prove important in the long term can be singled out. In spite of this, it is worth attempting to summarize how the significant changes in the epoch 3900–800 BC came about, and why. In truth what is most striking is not change, but the lack of change. The entire Neolithic and Bronze Age had something in common that can be summed up in one word: ‘long-house’.

  Throughout this period people lived in long-houses. Admittedly not all the people of the Funnel-Beaker Culture did so, nor did any of the Pitted Ware Culture, but for the whole period from the Early Neolithic until the Late Bronze Age there were always some people who lived in long-houses, and from the Late Neolithic most of them did. Before the Early Neolithic, long-houses were unknown. However, long-houses were merely the embodiment of something even more important, as we have seen, for throughout the entire Neolithic and Bronze Age, agriculture was practised by family-sized groups of people; by households. The typical composition and size of these groups may have varied somewhat over time, perhaps particularly during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, but in all essentials they remained the same: they were relatively small groups of people who worked together within a household. The word ‘farm’ is not out of place here.

  In the household, labour was divided according to gender, and gender roles had different status and prestige. The basic similarity remained, though, that the household was built up around a community of work. This found its expression in ritual, sacrifice, and myths that centred on the continued survival of agriculture, the household, and the world; on the constant cycle of seasons and life. Something that did change, however, was the number of households in a given place. A study of one very limited area of southern Skåne has calculated that it had 2–3 long-houses in the Early and Middle Neolithic, 8 in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, and 13–18 in the Late Bronze Age.10 Naturally agriculture itself was changed in its very fundamentals, from how the soil was prepared to the food that was cooked.

  Between 3900 and 800 BC, much of the woodland was transformed into a man-made landscape reminiscent of parkland, and in the plains into solitary groves in a treeless countryside. This was the result of ring-barking, slash and burn clearance (swidden), and the pressure of grazing –and a series of changes in agricultural techniques. These changes can either be seen as a constant stream of innovations, or as a handful of episodes when a number of innovations were introduced at the same time, bringing even greater changes in their wake. The matter is problematic because of the long time perspective. What is simultaneous when viewed over the course of a millennium? The shortcomings of modern dating techniques are another problem. How to understand things to which individual people and households might have reacted, when the margin of error on how objects are dated
is as great as 200–400 years?

  Tentatively, three major periods of change can be distinguished in Neolithic and Bronze Age Sweden:

  (i) The introduction of agriculture, 4000–3800 BC. In the course of a few generations, the cultivation of grain and the keeping of cattle and pigs spread across the southern part of Sweden. The same period saw the spread of a new way of life associated with the long-house.

  (ii) The revolution in secondary products, 3000–1500 BC. This period saw the culmination of many changes, the first appearances of which came at very different times. The result was an Early Bronze Age farm that looked very different and was occupied by a household that functioned in a very different manner when compared to the Late Middle Neolithic. Ards, horses and carts, sheep bred for wool, looms, oats and millet, bronze tools, specialized sickles, and earthenware strainers are amongst the distinguishing features of the new period.

  (iii) The advent of historical farms, 1000–800 BC. Over the course of a couple of centuries, farms began to be built with outbuildings, sometimes with byres. They had cleared, permanent, manured fields. The innovations of the previous millennia came together in an effective whole, helped along by iron tools, which were first manufactured at this point.

  The new efficiency of agriculture cannot only be identified, it can also be calculated. The net biological production of a given area is the sum of the total growth of plants and animals in one year’s growing season, and to a great extent is made up of the green foliage of trees and herbaceous plants. In the Early Neolithic, a household drew on fifty times as much of this production as did its Mesolithic predecessor. By the Late Bronze Age this figure had doubled again, at the same time as a more productive landscape had been created through human intervention and the effect of domesticated animals.

  The increasing efficiency was dependent on forest clearance and the depletion of the existing brown forest soil. The gross productivity of the land, that is to say the sum of growing stems, stalks, twigs, leaves, and herbs, dropped. Greater efficiency also resulted in increases in eluviation, erosion, and sand migration. In the long term, agriculture settled into a vicious circle. Increasingly efficient agriculture wrought changes to the landscape, which in turn forced the pace of agricultural efficiency to feed a growing population. Agricultural production increased, but at the price of ever more work. Production increased per unit land area, but decreased per unit time. The question is whether this picture of the interaction of ecology, population growth, and agricultural techniques can explain why farms and the cultivated landscape changed; why people began to act and think in new ways.

  The changes to the climate and soil inherent in glacial–interglacial cycling, combined with a slow but steady increase in population, must be part of any account of why the cultivated landscape altered. Yet though the changes to the climate in around 1000 BC were significant, they cannot be the only explanation. The chronological, geographical, and cultural variations were greater than the ecological variations of the cycle. For a satisfactory explanation, we must look also to other factors.

  Similar changes to those in Sweden’s cultivated landscape occurred across the whole of northern Europe. However, is not sufficient to say that people in Scandinavia constantly adapted to a stream of ideas from the continent, often from the south. People were quite capable of knowing about new developments on the continent without implementing them. Agriculture itself is one such example, wool-work another. It is not enough for innovation to spread: it must also win approval and be adopted. The tricky question is thus why there might be a wait of many generations before an innovation was embraced.

  One possible explanation can be sought in how people form societies. In the smallest groups of people, in other words in households, individuals took decisions on whether to change their lives without the benefit of a clear impression of climate change, population growth, or the stream of innovations from continental Europe. Theirs was a down-to-earth view of their own and their neighbours’ situation. That was all they had to go on. As was at its clearest in the Neolithic, different kinds of agriculture were associated with different lifestyles, and these in turn have been bracketed as ‘archaeological cultures’, of which the Battle-Axe Culture in the Late Middle Neolithic is an example.

  In illiterate societies, people and groups of people in, say, households function by meeting and talking, and by using ritualized actions and recognizable objects, and it was this that bound together the various Neolithic cultures and periods. Small groups of people who wanted to demonstrate their affinity elected to change at the same time and in the same manner, in the process choosing a lifestyle that set them apart from the people from whom they wish to distance themselves. Each of the different lifestyles had its own kind of food, produced by different forms of agriculture, amounting to what seems to have been the characteristic social mechanism of the Neolithic.

  In the Bronze Age, people organized themselves into larger groups of households under chiefs and their kin who commanded the farms’ surpluses, and not least their herds of cattle. The surpluses were used by the chiefs to conduct ceremonies, to arrange imposing sacrifices and burials, to hold festivities, and to exchange for prestigious objects. The changes in the Bronze Age occurred in societies where people had varying degrees of influence and power. The ones with the power were also the ones who were most aware of the societies on the continent that if collaborated with could give them access to high-status, unusual bronze objects such as chased bowls and elaborate weapons, and not least to the raw materials with which to make bronze objects.

  Changes in the cultivated landscape were necessitated in the long term by ecological changes and population growth. Ideas and a knowledge of societies of different types than their own could be obtained from the stream of news from the continent. Change was in part the result of the agriculturalists’ efforts to unite in overcoming the tribulations of daily life and, in due course, to generate a surplus to be used by those who ruled over them. Where once there were groups of households that collaborated within a framework of tribes and clans, households now divided into those who produced a surplus and those who commanded the same surplus. Land, livestock, and property were held less in common and more by the individual. The cleared fields and stalled cattle of a Bronze Age farm should be seen in this perspective. They embodied a form of agriculture that was no longer the collective concern of all who belonged to the group. The rights and duties of agriculture were now firmly tied to individual farming households, and it is in the remains of the Iron Age cultivated landscape that this is at its most evident.11

  CHAPTER 2

  Agriculture in Sweden

  800 BC–AD 1000

  Ellen Anne Pedersen & Mats Widgren

  The subject of this chapter is the growth and development of agriculture in the Iron Age, which in Swedish prehistoric chronology refers to the period between roughly 500 BC and AD 1000. However, many of the decisive moments that were to determine the agriculture typical of the Iron Age had already occurred back in the Bronze Age. We have therefore extended our discussion by some three hundred years to 800 BC. In this ‘long Iron Age’, settlements, fields, meadows, and pastures expanded into land that had previously been used more extensively. The expansion, however, cannot be characterized as simple, even, gradual growth. Instead, periods of expansion, colonization, and deforestation alternated with periods of recession, retreat, and reforestation. New technologies and practices were introduced–the tools, crops, and farming systems that would increase productivity. Moreover, through all the different eras of the Iron Age, agriculture was influenced by shifting socio-political structures and processes that had a profound impact on production, settlement patterns, and the landscape. As a result, agrarian landscapes underwent a series of radical changes. As will be shown, these changes were often as fundamental as the much later, and much better known, land reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Iron Age agriculture was neither primitive nor stagnant.


  The emergence of mixed farming

  From the southernmost province of Sweden to agriculture’s northern margins, there was a well-documented expansion of agricultural open lands during the first millennium BC. The dramatic opening up of former forests and woodlands in Skåne during the late Bronze Age clearly represented a decisive step towards the present appearance of the agricultural plains of the south. Cultivated and grazed areas expanded, topsoil erosion increased, and pastures and meadows with semi-natural vegetation came to dominate for the first time. The general expansion of human influence also paved the way for the most rapid increase of floristic diversity in the whole Holocene epoch. The land was transformed into a humanized mosaic of fields, meadows, pastures, and managed woodlands. Simultaneously, in the eighth century BC, people started to cultivate barley, wheat, and oats along the lower reaches of the Ume River on the Baltic coast, at 64° N, which was then the northernmost limit of cultivation. The expansion into this northern area was short-lived, however, for cultivation ceased in about 400 BC, and not until after AD 500 would there again be any agricultural expansion in these areas.1

  Figure 2.1 The proportion of pollen and spores that indicate arable, meadows and other open land. Pollen diagrams from four different localities in a transect from coast to inland in the Ystad area in southern Sweden. Source: Berglund 1991, 414.