Mesolitiska möten : Strandvägen, en senmesolitisk boplats vid Motala ström

This dissertation focuses on the Strandvägen site located in the town of Motala, Östergötland, Sweden. The problem concerns what shaped the material expressions on the site during 5500?5000 B.C. For reasons of text structure the space outside the settlement site (the home) is divided into the world, the district, and the neighbourhood. These spatial concepts are finally brought together in the synthesis: the world in the home ? the home in the world. The inhabitants at home were involved in social relations which extended far beyond the geography of their settlement site and far beyond economic calculations. To search for these relations I have conducted several empirical studies of the material culture in order to compare their various spatial connections. Even though it cannot be proved that Central European Neolithic communities (LBK) played any crucial role in the shaping of individual groups of artefacts, the changes in the Mesolithic cultures of southern Scandinavia nevertheless illustrate that these were part of a well-functioning network of long-distance contacts in which several important stimuli for change were transmitted. The exchange of objects means, above all, changes and reinterpretations of the ideas contained in the objects. Chapman (2000) describes this in terms of translations, showing how content and meanings get lost in connection with this. In the dissertation I use the concept of reinterpretations. The community at Strandvägen and the archaeological traces that remain of it are not primarily interpreted to have been shaped according to economic pragmatism/functionalism but to have functioned as components in interpersonal relationships and in social constructions, i.e. cosmologies. My suggestion is a frame of local communities open to communication, with similar reinterpretations of a cosmological world order. Certain ingredients and phenomena in the cosmology were more important than others and therefore more alike. An important common denominator is water, fish and fishing, and the animals that live in water, e.g. seal. The conclusion is that the home was reflexively linked to the neighbourhood, the district, and the world through social relations. The home was in the world and the world was in the home