Boat graves and affects : A study of affects surrounding boatgraves departing from a discussion of presence and absence of bodies at Valsgärde and Sutton Hoo.

This thesis studies the famous boat graves in Valsgärde, Sweden and Sutton Hoo, England. Its purpose is to understand the affects these graves had on the people who surrounded and visited them. Affect describes the first reaction when a person experience somthing new. The other focus of this thesis is the boat graves that seemingly lack buried people, and why the bodies in the graves are missing. There are some fragments of both humans and animals in the Valsgärde graves. In Sutton Hoo there are small amounts of remains from humans or animals, the osteologists have not been able to ascertain which of the two. There are some theories that the burials have been open for everyone to see, the question is then why and if this is the case, how did people react to this phenomenon, that is the boat-graves affects. The thesis concludes that the now missing bodies may have been exposed in the open for a long time, before they were buried. The soil´s acidity at Sutton Hoo is at pH 3,8 at the lowest, which has an impact on how well bodies are preserved in the ground. Both the soil and the exposing of the bodies might have done an equal amount of damage to the bodies