The Agrarian History of Sweden: From 4000 BC to AD 2000

By Nordic Academic Press

Comprehensive and concise, this account details the agrarian history of Sweden - as it is defined by its present national borders - from the Neolithic times to present day. Key historical concepts and events are discussed, including the introduction of planned agriculture alongside the domestication of animals; the feudal relationships and interactions between men and women, various age groups, and different social classes during the Middle Ages; the changes brought about by industrialism and the development of political democracy; the effects of World Wars I and II; and Sweden's inclusion in the European Union in 1995. This study also examines the interdependence between agriculture and other industries as well as the relationship between agriculture and politics on a local, regional, national, and international level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9789187121104

Book preview

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The publication of this work has been realized with the generous support of Stiftelsen Lagersberg, Eskilstuna, Sweden.

Nordic Academic Press

P.O. Box 1206

SE-221 05 Lund

www.nordicacademicpress.com

© Nordic Academic Press and the Authors 2011

Translations: Charlotte Merton

Typesetting: Stilbildarna i Mölle, Frederic Täckström, www.sbmolle.com

Maps and figures: Stig Söderlind

Cover: Anette Rasmusson

Cover image: ‘The harvest’, a painted tapestry by Johannes Nilsson

(1757–1827), from Breared in southern Sweden.

Photo: Halland’s Regional Museum, Halmstad.

ISBN: 978-91-85509-76-8

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 - Early farming households

CHAPTER 2 - Agriculture in Sweden

CHAPTER 3 - Farming and feudalism

CHAPTER 4 - The agricultural revolution in Sweden

CHAPTER 5 - Agriculture in industrial society

CHAPTER 6 - The tension between modernity and reality

CHAPTER 7 - Swedish agrarian history –the wider view

Notes

Statistical appendix

Bibliography

Introduction

Janken Myrdal & Mats Morell

Interest in agrarian history–part of the broader history of social evolution and people’s living conditions–is growing internationally. The agrarian history of Sweden, which is presented here for an international readership, is important to this international dialogue, not least because there is an extensive research base in the country and a recent, comprehensive work on the subject, which is presented in this book in abridged form. Nordic Academic Press, in willingly shouldering the publication of this book, has made an important contribution by making Swedish history, and Swedish research, available to a wider academic audience.

This book is a compressed version of a five-volume work, Det svenska jordbrukets historia, published between 1998 and 2003. The project was prepared under the aegis of Nordiska museet, with Janken Myrdal serving as the principal editor and with seven contributing authors. Stiftelsen Lagersberg (the Lagersberg Foundation) funded the entire project, and has continued to fund the preparation of this international edition and its translation into English.

The background to the five-volume work was the growing interest in agrarian history in Sweden in the early 1990s, not least thanks to Kungliga Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, or KSLA), which in 1989 instituted a seminar on agrarian and forest history. After a couple of years, the idea of writing a standard work on Sweden’s agrarian history began to take form. The resultant project would run for over ten years, during which time the seminar acted as a vital sounding-board for the research required to complete the volumes. A variety of subjects that needed closer study were treated at the seminar, and the interchange between scholars from a wide range of disciplines spawned several new books along the way, with the history of cattle-farming, child labour in agriculture, and swidden cultivation (slash-and-burn agriculture) amongst the important but hitherto neglected subjects.

The five-volume work was partly inspired by the four-volume study of Danish agrarian history published in 1988 as Det danske landbrugs historie. Soon after the Swedish project began, the Norwegians were moved to write their agrarian history in a major, four-volume work, and the Finns their own in three volumes, while at the time of writing an Icelandic agrarian history is in preparation. Thus only a few years later, and after much mutual inspiration, the Nordic region now boasts no less than seventeen volumes of native agrarian history.

Initially the authors concentrated on research to fill the gaps that had already been identified, after which writing and then publication followed at a steady rate. Throughout the process there was intensive discussion on terminology and thematic treatments, and the entire work took shape in a dialogue between all the authors, yet it was never a matter of writing by committee: with at most a couple of authors per volume, each could leave their mark on the actual content. In the full-scale Swedish version, the illustrations are crucial, and the authors themselves selected and interpreted them under the guidance of an art editor. For reasons of space, most of the illustrations have had to be omitted from the English version.

For this abridged edition the authors have not merely compressed their earlier work and updated it with recent Swedish and European findings; they have in many instances shifted focus, and, more so than in the original volumes, the chapters are now closely related to developments in international agrarian research. The chapters are ordered chronologically, and each is complemented with a short overview of a more specialized theme. The ambition throughout has been to offer the broad outlines of Swedish agrarian history in a single volume. The book concludes with a synthesis of the entire work and reflections on the course of Swedish agrarian development and historical research against an international background. There is also an appendix with statistical data concerning primarily the early modern period onwards, and a bibliography of the most important works in the field, with particular focus on research published in the last decade. The aim of this book is to offer readers–be they students, general readers, those of Swedish descent, or professional agrarian historians–a comprehensive, logically arranged, and lucid introduction to Sweden’s oldest industry. Readers who wish to pursue any particular issue will find plenty of suggestions for further reading in the notes and bibliography.

Even if the agrarian population and the circumstances of agricultural production are the heart of the book, it is inevitable that, faced with six thousand years of history, the importance of the various themes will vary considerably according to the period under discussion, and that there will be some overlap between periods. Choosing a terminology that holds good for all ages–and chapters–is a delicate matter, and was the source of lively debate between the authors in the preparation of the Swedish version. With translation came new excitement, for the agrarian history of each country has produced a series of specific terms, often legally or socially defined, on which developments in historiography largely depend. Many are resistant to translation. We have Britain’s customary tenant and Sweden’s skattebonde; Norway’s odelsrett and Denmark’s gårdmand. These problems are rarely insurmountable, given that the similarities are often greater than the individual terms might lead us to think, but in some instances the terminological variations reflect very real differences in meaning: translating the Swedish bonde into English is always a challenge, for it does not always equate with peasant. We have used English terminology as far as possible, but have elaborated on the original Swedish terms wherever their precise meaning is important to our argument.

Both the five-volume edition and the condensed, updated version presented here are part of a wider trend that in recent years has seen agrarian and rural history become lively fields of European research. It is part and parcel of this that their historiography has become a subject in its own right. Indeed, two important works have recently been published that together treat agrarian historiography for much of Europe: The Rural History of Medieval European Societies and Rural History in the North Sea Area.¹ Neither book mentions Swedish research of any date, and for this reason we felt it appropriate to open the book with a brief account of the Swedish literature.²

The beginnings of agrarian history in Sweden

The publication of books and pamphlets in Sweden accelerated from the 1730s onwards, and among the major beneficiaries of this explosion were agricultural texts. The 1770s saw a further increase, when the first large works on Swedish agrarian history were also published. Shorter references to the history of agriculture were made in several books published in the late eighteenth century, its inclusion primarily justified on the grounds of political and economic utility. A utilitarian focus, and above all the rancorous debate on contemporary agrarian policy, was central to the hundred-page epic, Landtbrukets öden i Sverige (‘The fate of farming in Sweden’), published in 1776 by the lawyer and librarian Fredrik Mozelius in the proceedings of the Royal Patriotic Society. As he wrote in his introduction, ‘In the present century, philosophical as it is rightly called, the history of its industries has, as it were, been instilled with life since the founding of scientific and agricultural societies in the majority of European countries.’ Engelbert Jörlin, a farmer’s son, who in 1777 published an even longer text in the same series, departed from the narrow utilitarian trend. A disciple of Linnaeus, he had a predilection for scientific systematization, and attempted to compile evidence of the types of animals and cereals that had been farmed since the Middle Ages. At the end of the eighteenth century, Magnus Blix, judge and controversialist, published his polemic Swenska jordbrukets historia i kortaste sammandrag (‘Swedish agricultural history in briefest outline’). Blix argued that Swedish agriculture was in decline, and drew a number of salutary lessons from France, where in his view the Revolution had been made possible by a similar degeneration. Some years later he was countered by Pehr Nylandh, a land-surveyor, who defended the recent large-scale redistribution of land and other measures taken by the Swedish state to improve agriculture.

There was then a pause of almost a hundred years before the next general summary of Swedish agrarian history saw the light of day: Peter von Möller’s Strödda utkast rörande svenska jordbrukets historia (‘Miscellaneous writings on Swedish agrarian history’), published in 1881. Despite being written by an amateur, a country gentleman from Halland, this work had modern scholarly ambitions. An ambitious and systematic survey of Swedish agriculture, it is if truth be told the first Swedish work of agrarian history that is worth reading for more than its historiographical value. At the time Möller was writing, cultural history had become firmly established. In 1881–2, August Strindberg, who had already made a name for himself as a novelist, published Svenska folket i helg och söcken (‘The Swedish people at work and play’), in which he dismissed Sweden’s kings-and-battles history. The book met with considerable resistance from established historians, and the ensuing debate mirrored the dispute over cultural history then raging in Germany. Strindberg, however, was far more radical in his emphasis on the common people than Karl Lamprecht in Germany, who only wanted to reduce the dominance of political history.

Soon a number of currents in cultural history became apparent. One example was Hans Hildebrand’s project on medieval cultural history, which saw the publication of volume after volume over many years–a level of productivity that matched Troels Lund’s in Denmark. Ethnology also became immensely popular, as is borne out by the existence of such Swedish institutions as Nordiska museet and the open-air museum Skansen, located in the middle of Stockholm’s main park.

Swedish agrarian history in the early twentieth century

It would be some time before the study of everyday life–of which agrarian history is just one branch–found acceptance as an academic subject. It was only at the start of the twentieth century that academics began to turn their attention to agricultural history, and even then such research was considered a form of folklivsforskning, later better known as ethnology. Ethnology was to be of great importance in Sweden, as it was in several Germanic countries and Hungary, and played a crucial role in shaping national identity. In Sweden, its leading figure was Sigurd Erixon. His favoured approach, adopted by his disciples, was to chart the regional differences across Sweden, although it should be noted that he also emphasized cultural flow across national borders, and thus was not interested in bald attempts to identify ‘Swedishness’. Classic ethnology had its heyday between the 1930s and the 1950s.

A subject equally significant for agrarian history was human geography, inspired by an international, and more specifically French, research tradition in which geographers pieced together ambitious accounts of entire regions, including their history. Swedish human geographers had at their disposal a source material of unique quality: seventeenth-century high-resolution maps and tax registers of grain and livestock. The first boom in historical human geography coincided with that in ethnology. Scholars in both disciplines published a number of works, some addressing particular themes or implements, others specific regions, producing in the process the first wave of agrarian history, and ensuring the subject rested on broad, scientific foundations.

In other branches of Swedish history–political history, economic history, and archaeology–agrarian history played a limited role in the inter-war period. There were a handful of exceptions. In 1923, for example, Carl-Gustaf Weibull published Skånska jordbrukets historia intill 1800-talets början (‘Skåne’s agrarian history until the early nineteenth century’). This work was published by the two local agricultural societies, and was just one of a considerable number of historical works produced under the auspices of Sweden’s agrarian organizations. Agrarian history also had a central place in Eli Heckscher’s monumental Sveriges ekonomiska historia från Gustav Vasa (‘Sweden’s economic history from Gustav Vasa’), the first two volumes of which, dealing with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were published in the mid 1930s, while the two on the eighteenth century followed in 1949. Heckscher, who also wrote a number of shorter works on the redemption of Crown land and on the enclosures, was very critical of peasant agriculture, and was convinced that the peasants’ relative independence delayed agrarian development in Sweden. In the argument he presented in his great monograph, he set out in particular to compute Sweden’s national agricultural production and place it in relation to demographic developments.

In the late 1940s, at about the same time as agrarian history became a standard subject in Germany and the Netherlands, with special research institutes set up and journals founded, it seemed for a while as if Sweden would see a similar breakthrough. Enoch Ingers, principal of a folk high school, published the first two volumes of Bonden i svensk historia (‘The peasant in Swedish history’) in 1943 and 1947, with a third, posthumous volume published in 1956. In the mid 1940s there were also valiant attempts to appoint a professor of agrarian history at the College of Agriculture at Ultuna in Uppsala. This met with stiff resistance from younger economists, who argued that the chair might jeopardize the anticipated further expansion of agricultural economics at the college. It was only much later, in 1994, that the chair was established, and it is one of the peculiarities of this story that a number of the agricultural economists who in their youth had been amongst its fiercest opponents were now in their retirement amongst its loudest advocates.

In preparing his work, Ingers, who was an amateur, employed a number of younger historians as research assistants, amongst them Valter Elgeskog and Folke Dovring, both postgraduate students at Lund University, and the first Swedish scholars to call themselves agrarian historians. Elgeskog defended his doctoral thesis on crofters in 1945, and gave it the subtitle En agrarhistorisk studie (‘A study in agrarian history’). Two years later Dovring presented his thesis on medieval units of land measurement, writing in his introduction, ‘What an agrarian historian seeks are not exceptional facts, but typical facts.’ He was inspired by the immensely influential French agrarian historian Marc Bloch, and even later would often refer to his work. Dovring published frequently, and unlike Elgeskog, who left academe, tried to make a career as an agrarian historian. However, a number of leading Swedish historians had other ideas, concerned by what they thought was Dovring’s tendency to write about agrarian issues without paying enough attention to the political and military factors involved, and the upshot was that he left Sweden and went on to a successful career overseas. Amongst his many works were the chapter on twentieth-century agriculture in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, and the book Land and Labour in Europe in the Twentieth Century, which ran to three editions between 1956 and 1965.

In 1953, before he left Sweden, Dovring had written Agrarhistorien (‘Agrarian history’), the book that can be seen as his scholarly legacy to Swedish history. In it he described in detail the direction he believed academic agrarian history ought to take. Now, half a century later, many of his suggestions are proving useful in research on demography, human geography, and settlement history.

The second wave

After the Second World War, decolonization brought home the fact that much of the world’s population were still peasants and that they played an active role in making history. One effect was an upsurge in agricultural and peasant history. Research departments and journals of agrarian history were established in several countries. In Germany and Britain, comprehensive multi-volume works on the history of agriculture were begun.

In Sweden, however, there were no immediate parallels. Folke Dovring failed in his one-man attempt to establish agrarian history as an academic subject. True, the posthumous third volume of Ingers’ work was seen through the press by the historian Sten Carlsson; 1952 saw the publication of Börje Hanssen’s Österlen, a much-cited socio-anthropological study of south-east Skåne in the eighteenth century; and in 1957 Gustaf Utterström published a large, if somewhat unsystematic, work on the transformation of agriculture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet little happened in terms of history and economic history, while agrarian history almost vanished as a theme in ethnology and human geography.

It was not to be until the 1970s that Swedish agrarian research picked up again. The way was led by economic historians, partly in reaction to the current focus in their field on trade, the iron-working industry, and the short-term causes of the Industrial Revolution. An entire generation of Swedish economic historians, with Lars Herlitz prominent amongst them, now turned to Eli Heckscher’s account of the dynamics of pre-industrial society. Several of them were influenced by Marxism, and, in seeking the roots of Sweden’s industrialization in the agricultural developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrated that peasant agriculture in many respects drove the expansion. While Herlitz studied taxation systems and landownership, most of his successors concentrated on production trends or on technology and its dissemination. While the ethnologists more or less abandoned research on agrarian history–not least on the dissemination of farming implements–it became increasingly important in other fields of history, in part because of the student revolts of 1968, when the history of everyday people and everyday life became a matter of public interest. Social history superseded political history; economic factors were seen to play an ever-greater role. The same was true of archaeology. In human geography, meanwhile, the historical focus had survived, but was given a new direction. Human geographers tackled the Iron Age with the help of field studies and archaeological excavations of surviving fields and settlement remains. They also succeeded in linking the field-study approach with the map-based tradition, with fruitful results.

The third wave

The first wave in Swedish agrarian history had come in the early twentieth century, with human geography and ethnology; the second in the 1970s, somewhat later than the rest of Europe, with economic history and history: now the 1990s saw something of a third wave, as the study of agrarian history in Sweden was put on an institutional footing. The chair at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences was instituted in 1994, and beginning in 1999 there has been a steady stream of doctoral theses on agrarian history–although the greater part of the research is done at other institutions around the country. The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry has run a programme of seminars and publications throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and has built up a library that is one of Europe’s finest in the field. At the end of the 1990s the parent volumes of this present book were published, and since then the field has taken on a more diverse character, in terms of both method and subject.

In recent years, historically minded human geographers and archaeologists have conducted detailed studies of villages and arable fields dating from the Middle Ages and before. In archaeology, scientific methods play an ever-more prominent role. Archaeological research laboratories analyse food remains and materials such as iron. Palaeo-ecology, in particular pollen analysis, has been especially successful. Osteology is no longer only a matter of brief analysis reports, but now includes comprehensive studies of the metric data and nutritional status of livestock–and humans.

For the medieval period, feuds and revolts are attracting particular attention amongst historians, while research on medieval economics is once again focused on prices, particularly land prices, and production trends. Research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has receded somewhat from a high point in the 1980s and early 1990s: one strand has concentrated on the size and distribution of production, another on social conditions and landownership. The lively interest in court and parochial records has been fruitful in research on subjects such as local politics and gender relations. For the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landownership and secondary production in peasant societies (skilled trades, flax processing, and the iron industry) have attracted attention, as in recent years have trends in agricultural production, with lively, often demography-based research on agrarian society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on southern Sweden. Research on the period from 1850 to 1950 had long been relatively neglected, but that has now been redressed by several new works covering a broad spectrum of subjects from agricultural business structures, the dairy industry, agricultural policy, and agricultural organizations to farm-level studies of the gendered division of labour and children’s role in agriculture.

The last decade has also seen what amounts to contemporary agrarian history. Agrarian sociology, which elsewhere came to importance in the wake of decolonization, never gained much ground in Sweden, while economists long dominated interpretations of post-war Swedish agriculture. Yet now there is promising research on Swedish rural development that in many respects echoes the tradition of European agrarian sociology that in Scandinavia has been strongly represented in Norway.

The third wave of agrarian history has meant that a number of new issues have emerged, and many neglected areas– the use of woodlands, to name but one– have been revisited. Even the boundaries of what constitutes traditional agriculture are being pushed back. What else –other than the production of food, fibres, and now fuel–will the farmers of the future be expected to undertake, when an increasingly wealthy and environmentally aware population demands to experience nature and rural culture and to be entertained by the landscape?

A tradition and a mission

An important recent trend is that scientists are becoming more and more involved in agrarian history. Biologists have started to bring history to bear on their analyses. There is considerable interest in interpreting species evolution and biodiversity from an understanding of supply systems and land use–and vice versa. As historians, and above all archaeologists, increasingly apply scientific methods in their work, agrarian history holds the promise of a closer connection between the natural sciences and the human sciences that gives reason to hope, despite the immense challenges we face not only in the distant future, but today.

There is a clear connection between the renewed interest in agrarian history, the new directions taken in agrarian history, and concern over pressing environmental issues. This is perhaps only to be expected. Agrarian history is about how we mobilize and cultivate nature in order to live, and about the social organizations and structures we have created in order to do so. There is a huge interest in examining the extent to which land-use systems have been environmentally sustainable, or how ecological limitations on production development have been circumvented by the adoption of new techniques or cultivation systems. Such research has a clear relevance for the problems that today face us all.

Agrarian history has thus become part of the environmental movement, in the same way that its development in the twentieth century followed the major ideological and economic changes that characterized that century. If agrarian history’s first wave was connected with the tremendous upheavals that followed industrial society’s obliteration of the old agricultural society, and the second wave was linked with the great political changes that called the role of the peasantry to our attention, so the most recent wave is associated with a growing concern for both welfare and the environment, and with an encouraging convergence of the humanities and the sciences.

In this book, the authors have concentrated their original five-volume work by selecting the salient points of Sweden’s agricultural development. It is our hope that this concise volume will offer the reader fresh insights into the long perspectives of Swedish agrarian history viewed in the light of international developments, and a greater understanding of present-day society, in which the future of agriculture remains crucial; for farmers not only feed us, they hold in trust many of our natural resources.

An enterprise such as this is only possible with the assistance of many friends and colleagues. Most particularly we wish to thank Richard Hoyle, Deidre McCloskey, Thomas Lindkvist, Mats Olsson, and Mary Hilson for their critical commentary and suggestions. We would also like to thank Annika Olsson at Nordic Academic Press and the translator Charlotte Merton for fruitful cooperation. We are indebted to Stiftelsen Lagersberg for their encouragement and support throughout the project, first with the five Swedish volumes and now the single volume in English. Without Siftelsen Lagersberg there would not have been a Swedish Agrarian History either in Swedish or in English.

CHAPTER 1

Early farming households

3900–800 BC

Stig Welinder

The introduction of agriculture to Scandinavia in about 4000 BC marks the dividing line between the Neolithic and Mesolithic periods. Scandinavia thus has an agrarian history that spans at least six thousand years, while a few ecofacts from southern Denmark suggest the possibility that the advent of agriculture in fact predated the accepted start of the Neolithic period by five hundred years. This first chapter of the history of agriculture in Sweden will treat the Neolithic and Bronze Age up to 800 BC.¹

Archaeology and agrarian history

Archaeological finds are silent. They are tangible in a very real sense, but they cannot convey their meaning in words. This is not the same thing as being unable to convey ideas, however. Archaeological theories and methods amount to taking a really good look at mute objects, viewing them from all angles in an attempt to understand voiceless people’s actions and ideas. The requirements of archaeology mean that the many thousands of years of prehistoric agrarian history bear little resemblance to the thousand or so years of written agrarian history. In part, this is a product of the inherent difference in the substance of archaeological finds and written remains, but it also reflects the fact that prehistoric peoples and societies were different. Prehistory is a remote, different, elusive, and extraordinarily long period.

It is the strength of a long-term perspective that phenomena that only slowly evolve, and which may appear insignificant at any given moment, can be studied in a broad overview. Fundamental changes can be distinguished from the continuous, chaotic flow of events. My main theme in this chapter, however, is the complete opposite; here it is the unchanging elements in early agricultural households–their composition, division of labour, and fundamental thinking–that are to the fore. Agriculture is one of the greatest forces of change to the landscape and the environment. Its effects are noticeable over decades and centuries, and in recent years it has become apparent that agricultural policy decisions can have consequences for the landscape from one year to the next. Yet today’s cultivated landscape began to take shape many thousands of years ago.

Beginning in about 1000 BC there were clearance cairns, lynchets, stone walls, and a good deal more to be seen lying in the landscape; remains that can be mapped and combined to form a picture of the fossil cultivated landscape of a distant past that lies as much amongst the landscape of today as it lies underneath. This fossil cultivated landscape, with its farmyards, fields, meadows, and droves, is an excellent source of information about ancient agriculture. Agriculture before about 1000 BC was very different to what it would become, and for this earlier period there are hardly any traces of a fossil cultivated landscape to study. The landscape of that era must be reconstructed with more indirect methods, which, while a challenge, is not an impossibility.

Agriculture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age used relatively simple tools. People rarely cleared stones or used the same ground for any length of time, two things that were to be the distinguishing marks of later periods. Agriculture exploited large areas of land with minimal labour –the term ‘extensive agriculture’ suits it well–which would seem to be part of the reason why no fossil cultivated landscape survives from this period. The importance of working with their own hands and their own bodies outweighed the use of draught animals. Mouldboard ploughs and harrows did not exist, nor, obviously, any machinery. Manure was not used, at any rate not systematically. Scythes and all other iron tools did not exist. This was, after all, the age of stone and bronze. Agriculture used simple technology and little energy. The designation ‘low energy technology’ is apt. However, the fact that the tools were simple does not mean that they were unsophisticated; indeed, far from it.

Silent and different people

The landscape, agriculture, and actions of the prehistoric population, like the broad patterns of their lives, must be understood from their material culture. By ‘material culture’ is meant the buildings and objects of all kinds, from clothing to tools, that they used, but also a variety of things such as cooking refuse, tattoos, murals, and earrings. It is the way in which they created and used their material culture that articulated their relationship with one another and their environment. Words and thoughts, work and patterns of life, all exist as material culture–as the archaeological finds of a once living people’s material culture.

In the present context, it is people’s work in creating and maintaining a cultivated landscape that is paramount. For the period before 1000 BC this landscape survives in countless traces, barely distinguishable to the untrained eye. From archaeological excavation sites and from geological samples there is the evidence of pollen grains, pieces of bone, charred seeds, and other remains from the prehistoric landscape’s flora and fauna. These are small fragments of our picture of the prehistoric landscape and prehistoric people’s relationship to the landscape.

Archaeology’s mute source material creates silent archaeological people. This has both its limitations and its opportunities compared with the study of written history, although in this chapter it is the advantages that are more in evidence. However, it is not merely the nature of the source material that makes the people appear different from us. They were different. Prehistoric people had very different types of house and clothing than we do now, organized themselves as communities differently, and supported themselves in different ways. They spoke languages that would be unintelligible to us, thought in different ways, and had different emotions. As people they were both similar to us and different from us, and they would be as incomprehensible to us as we would be to them should we chance to meet.

Prehistoric people can be labelled ‘pre-industrial’, ‘pre-scientific’, and ‘primitive’; the latter meaning that they approached very different circumstances from our own with a different kind of logic. Yet it is the very profundity of these differences that mean it is more interesting to approach the people of the Stone Age and Bronze Age by taking our lead from present-day, non-Western societies in Australia and Africa, rather than by attempting to draw a line from recent peasant societies in Scandinavia back in time through the Middle Ages to the Iron Age. In capturing the different ways of life in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, I will not build on explicit ethnographical analogies, neither on ethnographical–historical comparisons, but rather on the archaeological finds. The comparisons hover in the background, of course, impossible to ignore completely: the words to describe what we find cannot be pulled out of thin air.

In archaeological agrarian history, change is viewed in terms of the immensely long perspective of the prehistoric period; yet if at the same time prehistoric societies are thought of as fundamentally different to our own, this becomes problematic. After all, the central question remains how and why change occurred. How are we to know which changes were important, or what the causes of change might have been, in societies that are so hard for us to understand? This is one of archaeology’s paradoxes, and one that the reader would do well to bear in mind over the following pages, and particularly in this chapter’s conclusions, which range over the first three thousand years of Scandinavian agriculture. There is no simple way around the paradox.²

The European background

From 5500 to 5000 BC, agricultural settlements were built across the central European continent from the Ukraine in the east to France in the west. Similar houses, graves, objects, and ways of life go by the name of Linearbandkeramik kultur (Linear Band Pottery Culture, or LBK), and are found in the region of the Baltic’s southern coastline by 5000 BC. The seashore was home to the hunter-gatherers. In the LBK settlements, long-houses were built with slanted roofs supported on posts that were sunk in postholes. Each of these long-houses was the equivalent of a household, perhaps a constellation better described as an extended family than as a nuclear family. In this way the tradition was established in northern Europe of long-house farms and long-house settlements that was to last thousands of years, spanning the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and only fading in the historical period with the shift to family-based agriculture accommodated in other kinds of house. But for now the long-house and the household were one and the same.

Southern and central Scandinavia was part of this northern European long-house tradition. Starting in around 3900 BC, the first Scandinavian long-houses were built to house agricultural households. They have been found in Denmark in the south up to central Sweden and the region around Lake Mälaren. Much of what follows centres on the long-house farms’ households. The geographical perspective is the artificial one of the modern state of Sweden. For the Stone Age and Bronze Age this imposes arbitrary geographical distinctions, but it does offer an interesting ecological gradient. The southernmost part of the country, the plains of Skåne and Halland, is a continuation of the European plains, and from there the gradient stretches as far north as central Italy is to the south–through a landscape of primary rock, marked by glaciation and land-upheaval, to the snow-covered fields of Lapland.³

Complex change

The spread of agriculture to new regions is sometimes said to conform to a three-step process:⁴

(i) Availability. Agriculture is known to the people of the region, but they do not cultivate the land themselves.

(ii) Substitution. Agriculture makes noticeable inroads into the subsistence economy.

(iii) Consolidation. Agriculture becomes the dominant source of food and other necessities.

The first of agriculture’s ecofacts–charred grain and the bones of domesticated animals–are found together with Funnel-Beaker pottery, and thus the rise of Funnel-Beaker Culture marked the advent of substitution, the second stage. The first stage had by then lasted at least a thousand years, with its associated archaeological culture named for Ertebølle, an archaeological site in Jutland, of which there are finds in Sweden in Skåne, Blekinge, and southern Halland. Ertebølle Culture ceramics were fired at lower temperatures, have thicker walls, and are less varied in shape and more sparsely decorated than the pottery of Funnel-Beaker Culture. The two kinds of ceramic can be used to distinguish between older and more recent modes of life during the pivotal period of 4000–3800 BC. Equivalent changes had taken place in northern Poland and Germany some 500–600 years before.

There are two schools of thought on how the two pottery styles and ways of life succeeded one another over time. By contrasting the detailed dating of sites where only Ertebølle ceramics are found with those with only Funnel-Beaker ceramics, it seems that the former existed until 3800