Near the ancestors at Archsum: a contemporaneous Bell Beaker grave and settlement?

Abstract

The Late Neolithic in Schleswig-Holstein is a period about which not much is known. A re-analysis of two old excavations near Archsum on the island of Sylt provides us with a case study on both domestic and funerary behaviour dating to the later part of the 3rd millennium BC. The LA 65 site consists of a long-house with a sunken floor, ploughmarks and pits which contain both Common Ware and Bell Beaker pottery, and a grave with a Scandinavian flint dagger. On the other hand, LA127 consists of a megalithic grave in which a secondary cremation burial was deposited, along with artefacts showing a complicated interaction of mythology, memory, heirlooms, and identity formation. In this paper we focus on a long-term perspective, and place the practices carried out here in a larger scale. The use of possible ancestral objects and places in the landscape is reviewed, and the place of specific “Bell Beaker”-affiliated objects (pottery, flint daggers, and stone wristguards) in the Late Neolithic of the southern Cimbrian Peninsula is discussed. The division between Bell Beaker associated objects and daggers is clearly visible in the funerary context all across Northern Germany and Denmark.