Identitet i praktik - Identity in Practice

ger repertoire that signalled the difference of the TRB.
Further south, in Denmark and Scania, battle-axes of a
different design were produced. In the encounter with
people from the Funnel Beaker Culture of Southern
Scandinavia, the divergent design of the Swedish-Norwegian
battle-axes may have served as a reification of a
different kind of Funnel Beaker Culture, of a different
identity.
In the final part of the thesis the Funnel Beaker Culture
in Mälardalen and Bergslagen is compared to other
northern border regions of the TRB complex: western
Central Sweden, South-eastern Norway (Østlandet),
South-western Norway (Vestlandet) and Pomerania and
Chelmno in northern Poland. While the archaeological
material from each of these areas displays regional traits,
to an extent they also share a common repertoire with
the reoccurring artefact types: funnel beakers, polygonal
battle-axes, four-sided polished working axes, and
subsistence practices that to a larger (Poland) or smaller
(Vestlandet) degree included agricultural practices. All
these regions bordered on lands where groups of people
lived that did not share the cultural practices of their
TRB neighbours and – at least in Scandinavia – did not
practice cultivation nor cattle herding.
The Early Neolithic archaeological material found in
the area north of the Funnel Beaker Culture in Scandinavia
can be classified as Early Neolithic Slate Culture,
remains from aceramic hunter-gatherers named after the
role slate played in the lithic industry. In north-easternmost
Sweden the Slate Culture bordered on the Comb
Ware Culture (phase II) with a further distribution eastwards
in Finland and neighbouring parts of Russia and
Estonia. While the people of the Slate Culture were hunter-gatherers
without pottery, the people of the Comb
Ware Culture were hunter-gatherers with pottery, and by
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Fr e d r i k HAllgren
this time ceramics had been in use for more than 1000
years by the hunter-gatherers of Finland. The northern
local groups of the Funnel Beaker Culture in Poland
lived close to the Neman, Zedmar and Narva Cultures
of north-eastern Poland, Kaliningrad, Lithuania, Latvia
and Belorussia. These groups are normally considered
hunter-gatherers in the archaeological literature, but occasional
bones from domesticated animals are found at
least at Zedmar sites, indicating that some domesticates
were adopted or circulated to the north of the Funnel
Beaker Culture in the region east of the Baltic Sea. Rather
than a border between farmers and hunter-gatherers, the
northern limit of the TRB in Poland may be considered
a border between groups with different traditions and
contrasting cultural practices.
In the border zones between such traditions, in encounters
with people from different cultural contexts,
unconscious knowledge and dispositions were made
conscious. The cultural specifics in one’s own way of
life were made visible, insights that might have played a
role to form an identification with a social context that
went beyond the local. In such a process elements like
shared subsistence practices, shared craft traditions and
shared material culture may have been given meaning in
the construction of group identity. The realisation that
some people lived by different lifestyles and practised
other cultural practices may have contributed to articulate
the categories “us” and “them”, identities that
can be understood as examples of ethnicity. Because it
is dependent on the specific circumstances of the encounter,
such an identity is flexible; the same individual
may identify differently in different situations. Still it
is not a random identification, rather an identification
where history, culture and circumstances all contribute
to forming a negotiable cultural identity.