Identitet i praktik - Identity in Practice

On all these places and routes, each individual has been
part of different social settings defined through participation
in common engagement. Different locations
in the landscape have therefore been the arena for different
communities of practice and social configurations, the
composition of which were dependant on the cultural
practices performed, and which individuals these tasks
brought together.
Funnel Beaker settlements in different topographic
and ecological settings contain find material associated
with different subsistence practices. Thus, on sea-facing
sites bones from seal and fish are common, while on
land-facing settlements bones from cattle and sheep/
goat dominate and traces of cultivation, and processing
of cereals are abundant. Osteological and botanical data
are often interpreted in terms of subsistence economy
and diet, but my purpose is rather to discuss the activities
connected with for example sealing, fishing, cattle
herding and cultivation as cultural practices. Cultivation
of cereals has involved activities like the clearance of
forest, sowing, possibly weeding and guarding against
birds and forest animals, harvesting and later processing
of cereals, tasks that may have gathered the participating
individuals into communities of potentially different
composition. The engagement in the cultural practices
of cultivation contributed to form aspects of the participants’
identities. Engagement in agricultural practices
may have had a specific significance in the beginning of
the Early Neolithic, as the participants knew that these
had not been performed by their ancestors, but also
because groups living just to the north of the TRB in
Mälardalen and Bergslagen choose not to adopt cultivation
and cattle rearing at this point in time.
One aspect of seal hunting and fishing during the
Early Neolithic may rather have been to reconnect to
an historical or mythical origin. The seal hunting in the
archipelago and the spring netting of spawning pike
created a link to past generations who hunted seal among
the same skerries, and netted pike on the same springflooded
meadows. In some ways also the new subsistence
practices related to the past, as the first clearings for
cultivation were made in a forest crossed with paths,
memories and myths. The meadows that during spring
flooding were the location for catching spawning pike
may have been used for grazing cattle later in the summer,
strange beasts that were made indigenous by being
incorporated into the local context with its places and
stories.
As less time was spent by the sea, a new type of
burial site was established on islands in the archipelago
like at Fågelbacken. The topographic location of these
places reconnects to a geographical setting that may have
been viewed as a place of (mythological) ancestry for the
Early Neolithic people. According to this interpretation,
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Fr e d r i k HAllgren
people who lived part of the year at agricultural farmsteads
in the interior brought their dead to rest on communal
burial sites in the archipelago, where the ancestors
once lived their lives as seal hunters and fishermen.
The material culture of the Funnel Beaker Culture
of Mälardalen contains local variants of artefacts of
a repertoire that is common for the larger part of the
Early Neolithic TRB complex. Among these are funnel
beakers, collared flasks, clay disks, four-sided polished
axes with a pointed/thin neck, polygonal battle-axes and
saddle-querns.
Pottery craft was introduced as a novelty at the beginning
of the period, with the specific types funnel
beakers, collared flask, clay disk, and more sporadically
lugged vessels. The vessels are commonly made of fine
clay tempered with rather coarse fractions of crushed
granite. The tempered and processed clay has then been
built to vessels by coils joined together using N and U
techniques. Funnel beakers occur both as short necked
and high necked vessels. The short-necked beakers are
often undecorated or sparsely decorated, the high necked
vessels sometimes have surface covering decoration.
Short necked and high necked funnel beakers can be
found in the same assemblages, but often one or the
other type dominates on each site. The decorated vessels
are ornamented with rows of simple impressions,
cord, cord stamp, oblique impressions, toothed stamps
and pit impressions. Just as was the case with vessel
shapes, each site is often dominated by a certain set of
decorative elements.
Some of the variation in vessel shape and decoration
may be explained by chronological trends within the
Early Neolithic period, but an extensive programme of
14 C dating of pottery indicates that to a large extent it is
a case of contemporary variation. It seems that groups
of potters living on different settlements reproduced
their own local micro-traditions, each characterised by
specific technological choices in different steps of the
operational chain, from the choice of clay and temper,
through the shaping of the vessel, to the decoration of
the finished funnel beakers. The thin-section analysis
of pottery from the site Skogsmossen suggests that the
people who lived there utilised the same clay source for
several hundred years.
Funnel Beaker pottery can be viewed as a continental
phenomenon with a wide distribution in northern
Europe. At the same time regional traits can be observed
in the ceramics from Mälardalen and Bergslagen
(for example common occurrence of pit impressions,
decoration on the rim-edge, decoration on the inside
of the rim, twisted cord decoration already during EN
I, etc.), traits that distinguish this pottery from South
Scandinavian and Polish Funnel Beaker pottery. From
another perspective TRB pottery can also be viewed as a