Few helmets, dated to the Vendel period are known from Scandinavia and even fewer are known from the Viking age. Paradoxically, picture stones and sagas frequently tell about these objects as if they were very common, something that is contradicted by the archaeological material. The purpose of this thesis is to examine different literary sources and compare these to the archaeological materials and by doing so, gets a clearer picture about the emergence, use, function and of the late Iron Age helmets in Scandinavia..

In this essay I have chosen to do a cursory study of the spread of the figural gold foils. Emanating from foremost the Vendel time (550 ? 800 e Kr) in the Scandinavian countries Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I will also discuss their relationship to so called central places. Three central locations are in focus in this essay: Borg in Lofoten, Slöinge in Halland and Uppåkra in Skåne. I will also discuss when and why the religious cult changed during the Vendel period to Viking age..

The aim for this bachelor thesis is to find an answer for the placement of Migration and Vendel period graves on preexisting house constructions in Sweden. The reason behind these graves being built on their respective places will be analyzed, discussed and compared with similar finds in Scandinavia, where a wide contact net had been established during this time. Different kinds of social and religious meanings and functions with the grave mounds will also be taken into consideration during the discussion and analysis. The actual findings in the graves will be not be a part of this thesis, as the aim is to focus more on the grave itself as a cultural and social symbol for the people, and the values it had, during the time period it was built..

I have statistically worked up a material from 228 graves from the late Iron Age in the area of Mälardalen.In my material I have gathered the incidence of combs, knifes, beads, weapons whetstones and torshammarsrings.I have found that beads are overrepresented in graves of women and whetstones in graves of men. I only found weapons in graves from male.I found no indication from my statistic hypothesis (Z-test) that a grave that contains more than three beads should define the grave of a woman. A grave that contains a lot of beads, more than 20, consider I as a female gender.Combs, knifes and torshammarsring are considered as gender neutral..

Fish-head pendants are one of the characteristic Gotlandic Late Iron Age artefacts. This object has been rather neglected and mainly considered as an insignificant embellishment, normally worn as a neck-collar and seen as an artefact include in the typical Gotlandic set of female jewellery.The fact that the fish-head pendant has a very long life span, which stretches from grave-finds in the Early Vendel Age to hoards in Viking Age as well as secondary usage as brooches in the Early Middle Ages, makes the artefact an excellent starting point for discussions on social practices and change through material culture. It's shown in this study that, contrary to previous beliefs, the normal usages for fish-head pendants is as solitary pendants and not as neck-collars. Neck-collars is shown to have an intricate relation to inhumations for young individuals, whereas solitary pendants are found in cremation deposits for adult individuals, something that relates to a fixed social practice mainly in the period 700-900 AD and that develops from the cremation funeral practice. This particular social practice relates to aspects of attraction and protection and continues in to the 10th century outside of funeral structures, which is shown by the composition of hoard-finds from the 10th century, but is totally absent when the pendants is given a secondary usage as brooches in the end of the 11th and beginning of the 12th century.

This paper deals with prehistoric charred organic material, interpreted as bread, found in graves and in the underlying settlement at Kalvshälla, Järfälla parish in Uppland. The aim was to categorize the organic material morphologically and with the help of Fourier transformed Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) to see whether it was bread or not. Material from 13 graves (dated to Late Roman Iron Age until Viking Age) and 3 finds from the settlement have been analysed. Differences were noted both in shape, porosity and structure. Some of the material has been interpreted as cereal based foodstuff instead of bread due to morphological discrepancies.

This paper deals with the connection between food and burial habits during the late Iron Age in present-day Sweden. The archaeological material used in the study consists of 16 potsherds from a burial site at Alsike hage, Alsike parish, in the province of Uppland in east-central Sweden. On these potsherds have been conducted FTIR- and GCMS-analyses, in order to see what types of food have been deposited in the burials. Furthermore, the result of the GCMS-analyses has been compared to contemporary material from both burial sites and settlement sites, in order to establish whether differences between the compared materials exist. The analyses show that there are differences between the material from burial sites compared with the material from settlement sites, but not any particular differences between the material from different burial sites.