Den produktiva gåvan. Tradition och innovation i Sydskandinavien för omkring 5 300 år sedan

Abstract: The main issues discussed in this dissertation are the questions how and why farming and animal husbandry were introduced in southern Scandinavia. The Löddesborg site by the Öresund coast supplied most of the basic materials used in the analysis. Simliar sites in Scania and Blekinge, as well as finds of Limhamn-axes, pointes butted axes, polygonal axes, and dolmens complete the picture of the neolithisation stage. A discussion of site materials from Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg, and Holland places the situation in southern Sweden in a wider perspective. The produce from farming and animal husbandry is regarded as luxury goods, with no essential importance to the actual survival of the human beings. The people concerned are assumed to have lived in a favourable ecological setting, where they were not compelled to familiarise themselves with a new method of production. Grain and cattle are supposed to have arrived in the course of gifts being exchanged, tributes being paid, and matrimonial alliances being formed, involving neighbouring groups and the "fully Neolithic" groups further to the south. As a metaphor, "the fertile gift" symbolises the introduction of agrarian production which is, in its turn, associated with internal and external relationships.