A Circular Debate: Rock Carvings at Knarrbyn, Dalsland, Sweden

Abstract

The rock carvings at Knarrbyn in Dalsland, Sweden, lie high on a rocky ridge and consist almost entirely of multiple circles in various groups. In both location and imagery the panels at Knarrbyn provide a contrast with the varied figurative images on a majority of large rock carving sites of the Bronze Age in southern Scandinavia, which are mostly set low and near the contemporary seas. The paper aims to explore both shape and place of the Knarrbyn discs, with new recordings and landscape assessment. In contrast to the general opinion that Bronze Age carvings of circles had some close relationship to concepts of the sun, the Knarrbyn discs, by their unusual internal shaping and their position here on the high rocks, offer an alternative concept, that these particular carvings had close physical and ideological relationships with Bronze Age burial cairns in this isolated part of Dalsland. These and other late prehistoric monuments are mapped in the paper and include several previously unrecorded sites on the Knarrbyn ridge. The precise landscape location of the carving sites suggests they were part of a sacred passage in the Bronze Age, leading southwards to the major cemetery and rock carving sites at Tisselskog; such a passage may have foreshadowed and influenced the emergence and orientation of thePilgrimsledenthat traversed the same landscape some 2000 years later.