Week 31

We are now comming close to an end of this summer's excavation at Fröjel, Gotland. It has been 6 intensive weeks, but at the same time extremely informative and interesting. The weather has been rather good for excavation, in spite of the "bad weather" according to the tourists.

The last week has been dedicated to the final investigation of the graves that appeared in the north excavation area, as well as of the eroded stonewall that runs along the western side of the gravefield. A preliminary overview of the excavation of this area, showes that the eastern part of the area has been a gravefield from the 9th century, but with some graves from even earlier periods. As an example, there was one cremation grave from late 6th century, with a brooch and a beautiful bronse pin. The dead have been buried in two ways, either below well layed stone packings, or just in the ground without any demarcation. Some of these later graves have been badly desturbed by modern ploughing. It has to be remembered that the area in question has been ploughed for at list 300 years.

The northern excavtion shaft, seen from the "sea". In the background is the church in Fröjel, dating from round 1160 AD. Photo D. Carlsson.

All graves were oriented in a north-south direction, with one exception. It was a woman buried in an east-west orientation, with her head in the east. She was laying in a position that is called "hockerposition", which means with her legs very much bended and with her arms bended up towards her head.

Most interesting is the fact that all the buried, which means 9 all together, are women. There is no certain male grave, but one piece of a jaw found loose in the cultur layer might be a man, but it is very uncertain from were it came.

Another interesting detail is that one of the graves was without a skeleton and contained nothing but around 60 small rivets and a wetstone made of sandstone. There are two possibilities here; either, it is a so called "kenotaf", meaning a burial without a person, a kind of memory funeral, or that someone at an early date has taking the skeleton up. In that case, the dead must have been in a kind of wrapping, while we could'n find a single human bone in the grave. The most probable reason for the grave being empty is that it is a kenotaf.

The dead have been accompanied by typical femal jewellery, as animal headed brooches, beads, pins, knifes and belt ornamentations.

In the western part of the cemetery, there are at least two houses, stratigrafically situated above and on top of the graves. They are marked in the ground by a distinct cultural layer, with huge amounts of animal bones, charcoal, and many artifacts. There is a distinct fireplace in the southern house with firecracked stones. The material date the houses to the 11th century.

The excavtion of the settlement gave a very rich material. Here, a well preserved arrowhead of iron. Photo D. Carlsson.

Grave 47/98 showed a strange trace, which we have come across earlier. The deceased was places in the ground without any visible demarcation, but over the legs were some stone placed. The reason for that is not known but it might have been to keep the deceased in the grave. Photo D. Carlsson.

The houses have been north-south oriented, hereby in a good accordance with the other houses previously excavated. All together, this means that the whole pattern of the settlement have a very regular and rectangular pattern, obviusly layed out according to a plan.

In my next newsletter from the excavation, I will give a short compilation of this summers excavation.