Vistad ’88 Revisited
Ceramological Analyses and Lusatian Connections

Thomas B Larsson & Birgitta Hulthén

17. Hulthén, Birgitta & Larsson, Thomas B: Vistad ’88 Revisited. Ceramological Analyses and Lusatian Connections. 2004.

ABSTRACT

The Vistad excavations between 1988 and 1990 revealed constructions with a pronounced atypical, function-related late Scandinavian Bronze Age design pattern. The site in the province of Östergötland contains houses, palisades, hearths, kilns and ceramics of an unmistakable northern central European character. This character, plus other significant facts, justifies the interpretation that the discovered remnants once constituted parts of a Lusatian workshop.
The widened scope of this investigation indicates the past preparation of iron and iron ore inside the palisades. Geologists have pointed to the fact that considerable sources of highly ferriferous raw materials were accessible in the near proximity of the Vistad site. The deduction of the authors is that Lusatian people, probably from Poland, repeatedly prospected the area around Vistad for raw iron materials.
At the end of the Bronze Age parts of Scandinavia more or less embraced the Lusatian Culture, as indicated by peoples’ acceptance of new ideas concerning religion, usage and customs, craft, conception of form and æsthetics. Maybe the visitors did not feel “foreign” but felt more like acquainted members of a common “world”. To search for the necessary raw materials within this common world was thus natural, although such actions had to be sanctioned by the local, ruling families. In this perspective the Vistad complex do not seem unexplainable.

Key words: Bronze Age, South Scandinavia, Ceramological analyses, Lusatian connections, Iron ore prospection.

Thomas B. Larsson, Department of Archaeology and Sami Studies, University of Umeå, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden.
Birgitta Hulthén, Department of Geology, University of Lund, 223 62 Lund, Sweden