Abstract
To use ethnographic analogies is not the same as picking up ready-made interpretations from one cultural context and importing them into another. On the contrary, analogies are a powerful and necessary tool for any archaeological interpretation. If we as scientists are not aware of this we will most certainly use our own time and culture as an unconscious analogy: it is not possible to make interpretations, or even to think, without references outside oneself, and such references are nothing but analogies. l will put forward the hypothesis that the Late Bronze Age society of Scandinavia had rituals resembling, and probably related to, the Vedic tradition. As in Vedic tradition, fire sacrifice seems to have been an important ritual practice in Scandinavia. The Vedic fire altars are built as a symbolic microcosmos, repeating the creation of the world, and the fire (Agni) is seen as a link between earth and the heavenly fire —the sun.
Highlights
To use ethnographic analogies is not the same as picking up ready-made interpretations from one cultural context and importing them into another
L will put forward the hypothesis that the Late Bronze Age society of Scandinavia had rituals resembling, and probably related to, the Vedic tradition
The Vedic fire altars are built as a symbolic microcosmos, repeating the creation of the world, and the fire
Summary
To use ethnographic analogies is not the same as picking up ready-made interpretations from one cultural context and importing them into another. Inspiration for some of the interpretations here has come from fieldwork in the Kathmandu valley in Nepal in the spring of 2002, which comprised comparative studies of the practice of cremation and rituals surrounding it but which included questions concerning sacrifices (cf Kaliff k Oestigaard 2004), and from excavations of heaps of fire-cracked stone, stone settings, and hearth systems, along with other remains, from the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Sweden (e.g. Kaliff 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001).
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