Gravritualer vid gånggrifterna på Falbygden
En undersökning av den materiella kulturen inne i och utanför graven
This essay is about the burial rites in the passage graves of Falbygden, Västergötland. My questions were: Can the burial ritual be understood by comparing the material culture inside and outside the tombs? What kind of grave offerings did the dead have? Most peculiar are all these beads of amber, what kind of meaning did they have? Was the position of the body a part of the ritual? The time period is the middle Neolithic.I selected four passage graves to investigate: Hjälmars rör (Falköping 3), Rössberga (Valtorp 2), Näs sn 7:2 Kvättak 5:1 and Frälsegården (Gökhem 94).My conclusion was that there are differences between the material culture inside and outside the tombs. Outside the ritual includes fire, inside the material culture are not burned. The material culture outside is more dominant than the finds inside, although the beads of amber are only represented inside and dominates the findings inside. The ritual has probably taken place in two different places because the findings outside the tomb were deliberately broken and the bones from animals burned. However, there are no traces of burning outside the tombs, hence they must have been destroyed and burned somewhere else, probably in the settlement. After that, the people have transported the remains and scattered them outside the tombs. Attempts to reconstruct the position of the body were inconclusive but in one passage grave, Frälsegården, the bodies originally had been in a squatting, flexed position.