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.
My 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 am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel, as the catalogue of finds have now appeared.