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Per Lekberg
archaeological materials are potential sources for fruitful research. One of
them, and maybe the largest in numbers, consists of ground stone hammer
logical terminology.
soil all over Scandinavia. The idea of this study is that they possibly repre
sent a former cultural landscape of graves, votive sites and settlement sites,
contextualized once again, the axes might unveil this hidden cultural land
scape and thus open it to research. In Norway and Sweden alone, the ham
mer axes number in the tens of thousands (Östmo 1977). The provinces of
Sweden and the Mälar valley area in eastern central Sweden are the node of
the Scandinavian distribution. Following this, the predominant view of re
searchers during the second half of the last century has been that the axes are
Scandinavian artefacts. Only a very few archaeologists (for example Hagen
Bronze Age distribution from the Aegean via the Balkans, the Black Sea
steppes, Bulgaria and Belorussia up to Scandinavia. Many researchers of lat
ter decades have come to the conclusion that however abundant in numbers,
the hammer axes are too poor in typological elements to make a study worth
while. Despite this, the hammer axes have been considered and studied dur
ing the last century as one of the key artefacts of the Earliest Bronze Age
of Scandinavia. The studies have mainly concentrated on typology for the
sake of chronology, an approach that has opened up few paths towards a
conceptual framework of society and cultural landscape that could be ar
chaeologically fruitful in discussing the social and political structures of the
Earliest Bronze Age. In 1957, when Mårten Stenberger stated that research
on the hammer axes was an important task for further understanding of the
Earliest Bronze Age, researchers had already been trying to get some sense
out of these perforated stones for almost a century.
My interest in Earliest Bronze Age society, its social structure and its
political organisation led me to reconsider this mass material. As mentioned
above, I assumed that the axes represented a structured use of the landscape
and thus that they might prove vital in understanding this cultural land
scape and the society behind it. Consequently, I found it necessary to adopt
a different perspective on the study of the axes. This perspective included
production, consumption and deposition studies, together with the contex
topography of the landscape. This social topography and the society that
it mirrors is understood and described mainly from a Marxist theoretical
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