Mortuary palisades, single graves and cultural admixture: The establishment of Corded Ware culture on the Jutland Peninsula

Abstract

Abstract The emergence and nature of the supra-regional Corded Ware complex in the 3rd millennium BCE is a longstanding, classical question in European archaeology. While recent genomic and genome-wide aDNA analyses have shown that migration was part of the process by which this phenomenon spread across a vast part of Central and northern Europe, the archaeological record of the same area makes equally clear that the character of its more specific regional manifestations was not uniform. This combination calls for renewed regional studies aimed at understanding the pre-existing contexts, the situated processes and the variable outcomes of this new cultural formation, taking a contribution of migration as a starting premise rather than an explanatory end goal. This article presents such a study, focusing on a particular aspect of the so-called Single Grave burial custom on the Jutland Peninsula, which constitutes the most obvious element of Corded Ware culture in the region. Dating to the early part of this tradition (c. 2850–2600 BCE), circular arrangements of wooden posts or planks lodged vertically in a ditch to form a circular palisade are frequently found encircling a contemporaneous human grave. Here, we provide the first systematic study of these structures, which we argue are most meaningfully referred to as mortuary palisades. We present their distribution, chronology and basic morphology as well as their association with graves and relation to burial mounds, leading to a discussion of their probable ritual function in connection with a particular, processual understanding and handling of death. Based on this general presentation, we then analyse geographical variation in the manifestation of the mortuary palisade custom and discuss potentially underlying causes, emphasizing widely differing degrees of cultural admixture of Corded Ware culture and local, pre-existing traditions and preferences in different parts of the Jutland Peninsula.