Between Fairies and Sacrificial blood : An investigation about the Origin and Purpose of the Cup Marks in the Norse Landscape

The cup marks are the most common form of rock art in Scandinavia and they have been dated from the Mesolithic to the Migration period. In Sweden they are mostly found in the southern parts of the country. They are believed to generally have been made by permanently resident agrarian people from the Bronze age. The question about the cup marks origin and purpose is one of the unanswered questions in Scandinavian rock art research, which this essay has had the goal to answer with a holistic, statistical analysis based on all the registered cup marks in Sweden. Furthermore, the cup marks have been investigated in correlation with other ancient remains to see if there are patterns in the landscape that could indicate the cup marks purpose. The analysis confirmed that most of the cup marks probably where made by a permanent resident agrarian people on land mostly close to water, and that there seems to have been central places in the south of Sweden where different ancient remains have been made in clusters. No uniform meaning about the cup marks could be found with this method, but the research showed that with more detailed research about cup mark sites combined with a wider perspective about the entire cup marks placings in the landscape, new research will probably be able to get closer to an answer about the cup marks purpose and use in the Norse landscape