Där människor, handling och tid möts : En studie av det förromerska landskapet på Gotland

Sammanfattning: This thesis is concerned with the pre-Roman Iron Age on Gotland (500 BC–AD). The remains studied comprise artefacts, fossil field systems, ring-forts, burial localities, and places for iron-making, and more. The author focuses on the landscape formed by these remains, in an attempt to understand the people and society behind them. On the path to such an understanding, importance is attached to the acts and events leading up to the remains. The acts connected people and created relations between individuals and their surroundings. It is these relations, their materializations and the way they changed, that the study deals with.The period studied is presented as a time when people’s relations to the earth they lived by were vital for how they defined themselves and their relation to others. That earth attained this elevated position in the minds of people was not dependent on one feature solely. Cultivation and its material effects was one contributing aspect; the earthly origin of iron and the successive growth of burial grounds were two more. Archaeologically this mentality has resulted in vast systems of conjoined plots, in burial grounds, and in immense settlement areas that also had cemeteries.Further, the pre-Roman Iron Age is presented as a period when both the household and the local community were important factors for how people structured their lives, identities and surroundings. The institutions were complementary and people were often part of both. The institutions were upheld in different ways and have in turn given rise to different kinds of material culture. While the unity of the household was based on day-to-day activities and visualized by settlements with surrounding fields and small burial localities, the feelings of affinity within the local community were partly based on other factors and on activities carried out at other localities. Alongside ring-forts, vast burial grounds comprised such localities.