Indo-European Fire Rituals: Cattle and Cultivation, Cremation, and Cosmogony by Anders Kaliff

Author:Anders Kaliff [Kaliff, Anders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000822878
Google: cI-bEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2022-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

In several cases, special cult buildings were erected for the funeral rituals and for recurring ritual feasting. Ritual demolition and burial of cultic or ancestral houses has in some cases taken place when the ceremonies have ended or when new monuments were erected, with good examples from the Nibble site. Furthermore, parts of the demolished buildings on this site have been deposited in adjacent to burnt mounds or alternatively in pits or in stone formations. In some cases, the pits have been sealed with large boulders, weighing several tons. Another very clear example is Skeke. During the early phase of the Skeke site, two cremation pyres were built, presumably just before 1000 BC. One adult person of unknown sex and a young woman were cremated on the respective pyres. A few bones from the adult individual, altogether 14 fragments from different parts of the body, were buried next to a large boulder. The boulder itself was incorporated in a burnt mound, in the documentation material named A83. Nearby, the young woman was buried in an inconspicuous pit, containing a relatively large amount of burnt bones. As grave gifts she received a bronze dagger, some stone and flint tools and parts of ceramic vessels. The buried person next to the boulder received only parts of simple pottery and food – cattle, sheep/goat, fish and barley – as grave gifts. The bones of the adult, buried next to the boulder, was built into a complicated structure of spiral-laid stone chains, later supplemented with a cult house. Next to the cult house was a water-well, and after the demolition of the house the well was blocked with a solid boulder. The grave as well as the inner spiral pattern were covered with a thick layer of fire-cracked stone, which was judged to have been added in connection with recurring ritualised cooking in cooking pits in the area (Larsson 2014: 157–160; Artursson, Kaliff & Larsson 2017: 107–109). This type of small cultic building, documented on the Skeke site, is a type of structure that has been found in a number of ritual sites from mainly the Late Bronze Age and most often in connection with funerals (Kaliff 1995; Victor 2002; Mattes 2008; Kaliff & Mattes 2017) (Figure 4.11).

FIGURE 4.11 Reconstruction of a typical Bronze Age cultic building from the Skeke site in Rasbo parish, Uppland. This particular house was built as part of a burnt mound, used for repeated rituals during hundreds of years. The mound was arranged around a natural boulder, probably an altar – the old Norse hörgr – in its original form. Drawing Richard Holmgren, ARCDOC, after Larsson ed. 2014, Figure 7:2, p. 348.

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