Settled hunters and moving farmers: Humans, animals and the temporalities of landscapes in inland Scandinavia 1000BCE-500CE

Do the hunting-pit systems in central Scandinavia represent efforts to domesticate the landscape and harvest elks?

To what extent could the large quantities of hearths and cocking pits found in plain lands tell us anything of the mobility of farmers? Have people in fact ever been either mobile hunters or settled farmers?

This thematic point of departure corresponds to the overall purpose of the project to study how communities in the boreal, and central inland parts of Scandinavia were constituted in relation to animals and landscapes beyond homogenous categorizations as either mobile hunters or settled farmers.

This will be achieved by addressing: 1) the specific practices of hunting, herding, mobility and settlement patterns that are clearly visible in the archaeological record of the study areas. 2) the importance of seasonal temporality of landscapes in relation to movements, dwellings, and subsistence, within a wider social context of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age.

To reach this understanding we will address the composition, chronology and spatial distribution of archaeological records derived from boreal woodland areas and plainlands in central Scandinavia.

The traces of movements and settlements collected and analysed will be discussed in relation to a hunter-farming scale, rather than to homogenous categorizations of either one of them.

Further, the social developments in the study areas will be understood in connection to a wider Bronze and Early Iron Age sphere.