?Life on a delicate thread?Baptism and godparenting in Bottnaryd and Ulricehamn 1781-1783The aim of this study is to discover if there were differences between the baptism traditions maintained in a typical rural parish and in an urban town parish in the period 1781-1783 and to suggest possible reasons for any differences found. Baptism records from rural Bottnaryd parish and the town of Ulricehamn were studied and compared. In both communities, parents were anxious to have their child christened on the day of birth or the day after. They did not want to wait until the following Sunday, as church law prescribed. Infant mortality was high and if the child died before it was christened, it would not go to heaven.

The Christianisation of Sweden is not much about religion. Instead, there is much to be gained by looking at it as a colonial situation with changing social identities and power structures. This is evident by the prevalence of hybridisations in the archaeological material.Some of the material categories that show the clearest example of changes are the burials from the 9th century up until about AD 1200. This is exemplified by two different Iron Age burial sites in Stockholm county, Uppland, Sweden: RAÄ 59, Valsta, in Norrsunda parish and RAÄ 40, Lilla Ullevi, in Bro parish; They both show hybridisation by involving older elements with newer ones during a time period when the church was not quite established in the region yet.The Christianisation of Sweden is a colonial situation, but the research tradition has often also used a colonial lens from the 19th and early 20th century in its approach to the period. This means that the same questions, interpretations and conclusions, often based on written sources, have been continuously reused for a long time, which has had consequences for the archaeology in Sweden..

The bark from prehistory ? an osteological analysis on dog bones from the Stone Age settlements of Hemmor and Gullrum at Gotland and a theoretic study of the secular and sacred roles of the dog during the Neolithic.Dog bones from two Pitted Ware Culture (around 2500 BC) settlements, Hemmor in När parish and Gullrum in Näs parish/Havdhem parish, at southern Gotland, Sweden are analyzed. The analysis contains a study of age, withers height and size estimation as well as skeletal changes and pathologies. The attempt of the analysis is to highlight the secular and sacred role of the dog during the Neolithic at Gotland. The dog bones were collected during excavations in the years 1890 and 1903 and were found across the entire surfaces of the settlements.Although there were no specific dog breeds during the Stone Age, the dogs at Hemmor and Gullrum show a wide range of size (withers height spans from 39,74 cm to 56,47 cm) and may therefore have been used for different purposes depending on their size.

This paper aims to give an account of, and to discuss the view-points and theories of different researchers on the christianization of Sweden, especially the province of Öland, during the early middle ages. Its purpose is to investigate how, and in what sense, their positions can be said to correspond to what we may know of the historical ?facts?. This will be possible by comparing different points of view with a study of the development in a single parish. An overall difficulty however, is the nature of the sources relating to the time in question, they are scarce or even non-existent.Part I of the paper consists of an outline of the field of research and the different theories put forward on the subject.

This study investigated a local aspect of theSwedish elementary school modernization process between the years 1871-1882.Previous studies have been drawn from the school inspectors own reports andshow that the schoolboards housed a negative and resentful attitude towardsreforms and the school inspectors often felt that the parish priests were moreinclined to changes than the schoolboards themselves.  Other research on elementary schoolmodernization has stressed the matching grants as a major cause of developmentand further establishment. In this study, however, a schoolboards own notes inthe form of meeting protocols during an eleven year period as well as a letterby a priest Erik Lundberg, Redogörelseför skolhusfrågan i Tierp dated 6 October 1880 were analyzed to see if theprevious explanation of school modernization, in particular with regard to thereluctance to change by the schoolboards goes to demonstrate and confirm. Theresults of this study have shown that even if the schoolboards do notimmediately follow the school inspectors instructions, it seems not primarilybeen due to resentment. Reforms within the school world are well known forbeing time-consuming but for the current period, as this study concerns andwithin this specific parish there were conflicts of interest which are notshown when only the inspector?s accounts and reports are examined.

Between 1750 and 1850 the population of Sweden doubled. The increase was very unequally distributed among the different social groups of the rural population. The number of peasants grew very little, while the numbers of the landless (crofters, bordars etc.) more than quadrupled. This study examines whether Christer Winberg's thesis of the landless growth can be applied to Björklinge parish in Uppland. Winberg believes that it was mainly children of tenant farmers who became landless.

Most scientists believe that in the good times the peasant had the opportunity to follow fashion. Virestad parish does not follow fashion. My purpose is to try to understand something of the mechanism that made Virestad do so: that I will do by analyzing the results in relation to the concept of status. My main source is estate inventories. Here I examine the status markers and differences in what they invested in clothes and jewelry in relation to the estate's proceeds.The lower the balance, the more percentage they need to put on clothes.

AbstractThe aim of this study is to examine how individuals, part of a rural Christian parish,express their religiosity and beliefs in a Swedish context. Furthermore this study seeksto understand these religious expressions through different views on social construction,secularization and the privatization perspective, such as lived religion, in particular. Byusing qualitative interviews with 8 individuals analyzed with the theories mentionedabove my results show that secularization has provided many individuals with aChristian identity, however, not necessarily a Christian faith. Instead several of theparticipants show a self-developed religious expression not automatically connectedwith Christian religious practices. One of the participants has, despite a Christiansocialization, developed a non-religious identity.

Uppsats för avläggande av filosofie kandidatexamen iKulturvård, Landskapsvårdens hantverk15 hp, [2014]. (På omslaget felaktigt 2013).

This essay is a study and analysis of the funnel beaker pottery at Gullarve 1:13 in Väte parish. The purpose of the study is to analyse the chronology of the settlement by determine the distribution, stratigraphic context and the ornamentation of the pottery. Another purpose is to discuss the geographical location of the settlement in the landscape.In this essay a short review of the pottery and the funnel beaker culture as well as a description of the pottery from the archaeological excavation from 1984 at Gullarve 1:13 is presented. Since the documentation of the archaeological excavation from 1984 is missing or is very inadequate, no spatial analysis can be carried out. The distribution of the pottery can?t contribute to the result of the essay, though if possible it probably would have provided some interesting results.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the growth of the library in Vaggeryd. We have analysed how four factors influenced the library development during the years between 1862 and 1953. The four factors we have studied are development of society, collective actors, librarys economy and individual actors. We have worked with the following question: · How have the four factors: development of society, collective actors, librarys economy and individual actors, influenced the growth? We have focused on the changes that the industrialization brought on the society development, and on the growing of the non-governmental organisations.

In this study bone material from six stone ship settings and a total of seven deposits of bones from two sites on the island of Gotland have been analyzed. Four ship settings from the burial site at Gålrum in Alskog parish and two from Tängelgårda in Lärbro parish. The ships contained both cremated remains and inhumations.  Human remains were identified in five of the analyzed ship settings and a minimum of six individuals was identified in total.  Animals were found in three of the ship settings, where one of them contained only the burned remains of a dog. Two of the ships contained inhumations, one in Gålrum and one in Tängelgårda.

This rapport handles the presence of two kinds of watermills in the Swedish landscape. The first is a small type with a horizontal shovel blade and the other a bigger kind with a vertical standing shovel scoop. The rapport seeks for information of their capacity and how long they existed as flour producing units. A important issue is how small can a brook be and still run a mill. Finally the reasons for their disappearance in one selected parish is shown..

The forest and mire landscape surrounding the north Swedish villages have been of fundamental importance through time for the farmers. In the Scandinavian summer farm system the forest and mire pasture was used to its full potential. The system consisted of smaller summer farms some kilometres from the main farm in the village, and were the livestock grazed in the forest around the summer farm. The livestock affect their environment, and grazed forests generally contain a higher biodiversity than an ungrazed forest. The overall aim of this thesis is to understand the impact of livestock grazing on a northern forest ecosystem over a long time period.

The Church of Sweden had barely 6.5 million members in 2012. Just over 1% of the members visit a church service regularly every Sunday. The number of visitors in worship services has diminished continuously for a very long time. From 1990 to 2010, the annual number of visitors at the main worship services has decreased by 50% from 9 million to about 4.5 million. The service activities can still be maintained at the current level because the many passive members still pays their membership fee.