Centrality - Regionality: The Social Structure of Southern Sweden during the Iron Age

Iron Age research in Scandinavia has focused on studies of the significance of certain places as centres in political, economic, and religious spheres of interest. Archaeological research in recent years has shown that the Iron Age, chiefly the latter part, was a dynamic period with major changes. Danish and Swedish projects have examined this dynamism, but the discussion of central components in the understanding of the dynamic transformations that characterized the first millennium AD in Scandinavia has only marginally touched on southern Sweden. Due to intensive development, a large number of rescue excavations have taken place in southern Sweden since the early 1970s. In 1996 members of different institutes formed a group in order to initiate a research project concerning the Iron Age in the southernmost part of Sweden, including the province of Scania and the southern part of the province of Halland. The goal of the project, entitled “The Social Structure of Southern Sweden during the Iron Age”, was to study the development of society in a broad chronological perspective from 500 BC until 1000 AD. The main aim of the project was to analyse the hierarchy in the settlement structure. The overarching studies in the project concerned settlement and power structure in the Iron Age of southern Sweden and hence studies of local and regional variations. At the centre of the project was a continuous discussion of the concepts of central place and power. The landscape of power, in both its physical and its social shape, has not been sufficiently described and interpreted. The same applies to the properties that make a settlement unit into a centre. The project comprised several undertakings, involving studies differing in scope and orientation in southernmost Sweden, and studies based on work on the settlement of Uppåkra in south-west Scania. In the project the Uppåkra site serves as a catalyst because of its special structure and find material. Iron Age settlement at Uppåkra was first documented in the 1930s, but the current project did not begin until 1996. Efforts such as archaeological excavations and metal detector surveys have constituted the basis for a significant number of research tasks of a highly varied nature. The study of the Uppåkra settlement site, however, would not have been complete without a deeper understanding of settlement in the vicinity of the site.