The Origin of the Swedish Rampart Enclosures: Let Bronze and Ceramics guide our way.

The function and symbolism of the Swedish bronze age rampart enclosures has been debated since the late 1800´s. Arguments highlighting their function as fortifications and/ or as ritual centres has been passed back and forth in what today seems to be a subject in a standstill. Very little has been done in comparing the Swedish enclosures with their European equivalents when it comes to the understanding of function. In the early 1990´s their origin in the Lausitz culture of the Late Bronze Age was put forth by several archaeologists, but one needs to keep in mind that this was a time where the Lausitz culture was an increasingly popular subject for Swedish archaeologists to study. In time the similarities between the materials came to be questioned from both an architectural and a chronological standpoint. This paper has therefore been focused on re-examining the Swedish rampart enclosures relation to the European hill forts and fortified settlements. By examining its relations to the import of bronze and ceramics between the southern and eastern coastal areas of the Baltic Sea area and Scandinavia around 1300­-1000 BC, my main goal was to provide an updated and valid theory for the origins of the earliest Swedish rampart enclosures from the same time. Based on the analysis presented in this paper I have, to some extent, been able to distance the earliest Swedish rampart enclosures from the previous Lausitz origin theory. The conclusion is instead that an origin is to be sought in the earlier Únětice culture and it´s rampart fortified settlements from between 1800-1500 BC