Neolithic research
During my student years I got stuck with the
Neolithic. I did of course, as every student at that time, read through the lot
of European prehistory, but I found the Iron Age "too historical" and
the Bronze Age extremely boring. The Stone Age on the other hand and especially
the Neolithic, I found challenging. As I became employed at the university
immediately after my degree to teach theory and methodology I was free to take
up research in which ever period I chose, and that became the Neolithic.
Combining a revival of a Danish tradition for
settlement archaeology that took place during the seventies with impulses from
New Archaeology I focused on a regional approach to Neolithic society, where I
tried to establish the structure and internal dynamics of Neolithic society
rather than the broad culture historical fluxes across vast tracts of Europe
that dominated research at that time. My research excavations has generally
been kept within a fairly limited area of eastern Jutland, and they have been
focused on the older part of the Neolithic period - the TRB culture - where I
felt that the most challenging problems in understanding Neolithic society lay.
Many of my papers on the Neolithic of South
Scandinavia naturally deal with my excavations, but they are combined with
papers focused on the structure and dynamics of Neolithic society in South
Scandinavia based to a large degree on data collected within my primary study
area in eastern Jutland.
List of papers on the Neolithic of
South Scandinavia
In the early 1980'ies I established a formal
settlement archaeological project in eastern Jutland. For various reasons - not
least practical ones - the project was discontinued after some time. In 2006,
when I stopped at the university I revived the project. It has grown to a size
that I had not foreseen, but slowly I began to see the light at the end of the
tunnel, as the catalogue of finds appeared. With the publication released late
in 2024, I have now finally fulfilled my ambitions.