Fall

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The desert falls

The Fallet desert is what remains of a prehistoric village. It is located near the town of Tingstäde on the Swedish island of Gotland and about one kilometer east of Lake Tingstädeträsk .

The former village complex is concentrated on an area of ​​3.5 hectares and consists of ten house foundations in two rows, 1.3 kilometer long stone walls ( Swedish vastar ) and a burial ground. The isolated village is bordered by a marshland in the north and the sterile rock landscape " File Hajdar " in the south . Although no research has been done, it is believed that the desert can be dated to the Bronze or Iron Ages. Visually, the remains hardly differ from those on Herregårdsklint, in Fjäle , Rings or Vallhagar . This complex is part of one of the best-preserved settlement complexes on Gotland.

In the southern area are at a cemetery a Roese and nine round stone circles ( German  "Judge Rings" ), which measure between three and ten meters in diameter.

Iron Age grave customs

The Iron Age burial customs on Gotland are better researched than in the rest of Sweden . They show a wide range of variations in shape, in which cremation and body graves are represented.

The custom of honoring the dead by setting a ship, which was practiced during the younger Bronze Age , lived on until the beginning of the Iron Age. These late ship settlements are relatively short and made of small stones. During the transition period, they contain urn and body graves. In the body graves, the dead sometimes lie in rectangular stone boxes in the middle of the ship's position.

Sunken boat-shaped stone boxes, which in some cases are covered by large, flat stone mounds, also belong to this period. Few of them have been examined. A box on the large burial ground near Ardags / Ekeby, which has graves from the transition period and the pre-Roman Iron Age, has a boat-shaped appearance . A stone box on the small burial ground near the church of Fole is reminiscent of a stone ship sunk into the ground. At the same time, rectangular stone boxes were sunk into the ground and covered by stone mounds . They show the same inventory as the boat-shaped boxes: iron goiter pins, sometimes an iron belt hook or a bronze belt plate.

Finds from the burial ground of Fole are of great interest for the persistence of the Bronze Age forms in the oldest Iron Age. Four graves contained finds from the earliest Iron Age and those that are characteristic of the late Bronze Age:

  • One of them contained a straight cup-headed needle and a bronze gooseneck needle, two iron gooseneck needles, a bronze goiter needle, a bronze decorative plate with an iron chain, an iron belt hook and two bronze beads.
  • The other grave contained a straight cup-headed pin and a bronze decorative plate, as well as two crop pins and a tongue-shaped iron belt hook.

The other found burials in the cemetery contained similar combinations of two or more objects of a Bronze Age and Iron Age character, including hollow, bronze bulge rings . On Gotland the afterlife of certain Bronze Age forms can be proven in the early Iron Age. To what extent this also applies to other areas in eastern Sweden is uncertain.

After cultural exhaustion and isolation in the middle of the pre-Roman Iron Age, a new era dawned in southern and central Sweden. This phase includes, the last 150 years BC. The archaeological picture has now been completely changed and shows an abundance that is fundamentally different from the poverty of the previous period. In Sweden the phase is mainly characterized by two phenomena: numerous and large grave fields and the wealth of iron objects in the graves. In contrast, the remains of settlements remain just as inexplicably rare as before.

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Coordinates: 57 ° 44 ′ 12.5 ″  N , 18 ° 40 ′ 5.9 ″  E