A wide maritime network
These Bronze Age maritime groups were part of a network that extended across large parts of northern Europe and with links further to the south: a network maintained due to the increasing dependence on bronze and other important raw materials as a means of social status and cultural dependency.
Archaeologists have long assumed that bronze was imported to Scandinavia from the south, and recent analyses has now confirmed this hypothesis. However, the people who conducted the trade and formed the networks are rarely addressed, not to mention the locations of where they met.
‘One reason why the meeting places of the Bronze Age are not discussed very often is that we have been unable to find them. Which is in contrast to the trading centres of the [later] Viking Age, which have been easy to locate due to the wealth of archaeological material that was left behind,’ says the author of the thesis Joakim Wehlin from the University of Gothenburg and Gotland University.
In his thesis, Wehlin analysed the entirety of archaeological material from the stone ships and also the placement of these monuments within the landscape of Gotland. The thesis offers a new and extensive account of the stone ships and suggests that the importance of the Baltic Sea during the Scandinavian Bronze Age, not least as a waterway, has been underestimated in previous research.
The stone ships can be found across the whole Baltic Sea region; especially on the larger islands with a significant cluster on Gotland. The ships have long been thought to have served as graves and for this reason they have been viewed as vessels intended to take the deceased into the afterlife.
Skeppssättning (Stone ship), Gnisvärd, Gotland Image: Roine Johansson (Flickr, used under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
The site as a meeting place
‘My study shows a different picture,“ says Wehlin.
“It seems the whole body was typically not buried within the ship, and a significant percentage of stone ships have no graves within them at all. Instead, they sometimes show remains of other types of activities. So with the absence of the dead, the traces of the living begin to appear.’
Wehlin suggests that the stone ships and the activities that may have taken place around them point to a people who were focused on maritime trade and connections. Details in the ship monuments indicate that they were built not so much as spectral ships, but as representations of real vessels.
Wehlin feels that the stone ships can even give clues about the ship-building techniques and structural dimensions and this provides further insight into the ships that sailed the Baltic Sea during the Bronze Age.
This period in prehistory shows the ship as a dominant element of the visual culture; carved in stone, decorated on bronze artefacts or built as stone constructions. The ships visualised in different media seem to refer to factual ships and the variety could indicate different functional ships.
Early trading ports
Using terrain analysis, Wehlin has located what he feels are a number of potential meeting places – which could even be described as early trading ports.
In one part of the study area in the north-east of Gotland the water system consists of the Hörsne River which later becomes the Gothem River (the largest river in Gotland). The river runs north-east through the wetlands of Lina bog, and continues to its mouth at Åminne and the Bay of Vitviken into the Baltic Sea.
The Lina bog was – prior to the draining campaign in 1947 – the largest on Gotland. This area appears as a maritime landscape with a large inland wetland, bogs, river-systems, river-mouth, coast and sea situated within a rich Bronze Age landscape. The area might well have been important as a communication hub between the east and west coast one that continued into historic times.
Wehlin believes that it is no coincidence that one of the largest clusters of ship settings, almost 15 % of the total number of such monuments, appears in this region.
He suggests that people who were part of a maritime institution; boat builders, seafarers, people with knowledge and skills required for overseas journeys, such as navigation, trade etc., might have had a special place in the society. If so, they may be connected to the ship setting tradition. These features can be seen as a primary instrument for collective identification, akin to the rock-carving sites in Bohuslän. The burials that are present near these sites become secondary activities related to the power of place.
Source: University of Gothenburg
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