Site Locations on the Jutland Peninsula across the Late Funnel Beaker – Early Corded Ware Period Transition and Their Implications

Abstract

The extent of spatial overlap between late Funnel Beaker (TRB) and early Corded Ware or ‘Single Grave’ finds has figured prominently in discussions of how the latter became established on the Jutland Peninsula after 2850 BCE. Working mainly from regional distribution maps and often framing the issue in terms of ‘territories’, decades of debate have focused not least on the question of whether elements of Corded Ware culture primarily arrived in this region with incoming migrants or whether the late TRB groups that already inhabited the region during the early 3rd millennium BCE played a central role in adopting a new tradition. Recently, the results of aDNA research have shifted the relevant questions from whether migration played a role to which role migration played, how it interacted with other factors and how both processes and outcomes varied. The task of answering these questions calls for local-scale analyses and for comparisons across cases and contexts. This article examines site locations and the more detailed location of burials, ritual structures and funerary monuments at specific sites within a 40 × 40 km large area in northern Jutland across the late TRB – early Corded Ware period transition. The results show a high degree of continuity in the location of cemeteries in the landscape, in some cases down to individual burials superposing one another, and this leads to a discussion of different scenarios that may explain the apparent correspondence across the general shift in burial customs. The results obtained in the selected area in northern Jutland are also compared with site locations in another part of the peninsula, i.e. the Horsens Fjord area in eastern-central Jutland, which has also been studied thoroughly recently and where a very different pattern is found (Madsen 2020). The article concludes by discussing the background of these two different patterns and the presumably rather different cultural processes that took place across the late TRB – early Corded Ware transition in these two areas.