ABSTRACT
But one strange anomaly remains to be recorded. On the Middle Kattegat coast of West Sweden, and over a considerable hinterland, the stone cists have no place whatever in the Northern series prevailing elsewhere. The Skogsbo cist in Vastergotland is a typical example.1 They are long, for the
most part subterranean galiery-tombs for multiple collective burial, with an antechamber partitioned off by a slab typically pierced with a ‘ port-hole’— faithfully reproducing, in fact, the West European type of the Seine-Oise-Mame people described above. We have seen in Westphalia and Hessen (p. 260) that this was brought by migrants from France to West Germany: is it deniable that a further compact migration, leaving no traceable tombs upon its way, took these folk from homes either there or actually in France itself, where aggressive warrior peoples (p. 261) threatened their existence, overland to the coast and thence by ship to the seclusion of West and West-Central Sweden? It is at least undeniable that the Swedish cists have no otherwise intelligible explanation, and that their pottery most closely resembles the Seine-OiseMame bucket-type (Fig. 11,11), while lancet flint daggers1 show them to date from within this same period, the latest in which the French and West German cists can very well have been in use. And even in North-West Germany and Denmark, where stragglers from such a migration might have been caught up, the dagger period’s simple pots, though convention ally derived from the mortar-shaped beakers of the Single graves,2 have an unm istakable Seine-Oise-Marne look about them. There should, then, be a West European element in the Northern Stone-cist culture, and at that one must at present leave it. But this whole culture’s life and achievement falls really outside the limits of this chapter, for it is the con temporary of the full Early Bronze Age of Europe at large. And it is now time to gather together the variegated threads of the transition we have been so long following, and set the fabric of Bronze Age civilization at last before us in initial completeness.
