Fornminnen : det förflutnas roll i det förkristna och kristna Mälardalen

In English This thesis examine how farm-dwellers in the Mälaren region during the late Iron Age and early Middle Ages created, transferred, and preserved memory by deliberately placing new houses and graves on the houses and graves of previous generations. Focus is on memory as a social phenomenon and culture-specific resource created by these deliberate practices. The culture-specific element is oral culture.

Place is an important part of the contextualization of social memory. The pre-Christian and early Christian farm has a special quality that is so self-evident that it is seldom highligh¬ted - the presence of the graves within its territory. This distinguishes that farm from those where the dead were buried in a graveyard.

My theoretical framework is that of memory theory. In focus is human agency, formal and ritualized practice, and structured and constructed reality. All the media then available for memory construction are taken into consideration: formal and ritual acts such as ‘super-imposing’; material remains such as graves and buildings; sites on different scale levels in the landscape, such as farms with grave-fields and yards; narratives such as the Icelandic sagas.

The source material consists of more than 300 archaeological excavations of grave-fields and settlements conducted in the Mälaren valley. The analysis include four sub-studies of superimpositions: grave on grave, house on house, grave on house, and house on grave. It takes into account possible variations in the scope and expression of the superimpositions because of the chronological, geographical, and social context. One of the more significant results is that the superimpositions showed very deliberate patterns, implying that the practices were very conscious.

In the synthesis superimposition practices are considered as historical entities, and as functions of a possible historical culture in different eras. Down the ages, from the Migration Period up to and including the early Middle Ages, major regional changes in society have steered the contemporaneous perceptions of history. This means new social, ideological, and cultural context, which in its turn created the need for new memories.