Grebbestad
This morning we arrived in Grebbestad, a small fishing harbour on the island-studded western coast of Sweden. We devoted a perfect late summer’s morning to archaeology, the highlight being our visit to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tanumshede where we were given a guided tour of the largest collection of Bronze Age rock carvings in Europe.
Chiseled onto the local granite is a remarkable collection of prehistoric drawings: an assortment of boats, a marriage ceremony, hunting scenes, a serpent and a readily identifiable sperm whale. Prehistoric peoples by definition do not write but they drew with the lack of inhibition that characterizes our contemporary post-photography tradition. We recognize art, but their purposes in making these representations are less than clear. Religious, probably, in a broadly understood way: marking rites of passage, seeking blessing for the next year’s harvest or for the following day’s hunt.
Frequent Lindblad travelers have met these Bronze Age peoples before: the Mycenaen culture of Crete with its cult of the bull or the megalithic monuments of Malta and Menorca in the Mediterranean, or Stonehenge and Callanais in the British Isles. Here at Grebbestad we felt echoes of those other places: a fine representation of a bull, for example. Boats, hammers and ravens reached forward in time to the Viking world. Was it people or their ideas or both that linked these places?
We had arrived by sea on board the M.S Endeavour and had heard the previous day about how archaeologists now think in terms of cultural diffusion to explain how Bronze Age culture spread through the Mediterranean and up the western seaways of Europe’s Atlantic coast to the far North. As our travels so often remind us, there are many interconnections to celebrate and no better place to do so than on board our expedition ship.
This morning we arrived in Grebbestad, a small fishing harbour on the island-studded western coast of Sweden. We devoted a perfect late summer’s morning to archaeology, the highlight being our visit to the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tanumshede where we were given a guided tour of the largest collection of Bronze Age rock carvings in Europe.
Chiseled onto the local granite is a remarkable collection of prehistoric drawings: an assortment of boats, a marriage ceremony, hunting scenes, a serpent and a readily identifiable sperm whale. Prehistoric peoples by definition do not write but they drew with the lack of inhibition that characterizes our contemporary post-photography tradition. We recognize art, but their purposes in making these representations are less than clear. Religious, probably, in a broadly understood way: marking rites of passage, seeking blessing for the next year’s harvest or for the following day’s hunt.
Frequent Lindblad travelers have met these Bronze Age peoples before: the Mycenaen culture of Crete with its cult of the bull or the megalithic monuments of Malta and Menorca in the Mediterranean, or Stonehenge and Callanais in the British Isles. Here at Grebbestad we felt echoes of those other places: a fine representation of a bull, for example. Boats, hammers and ravens reached forward in time to the Viking world. Was it people or their ideas or both that linked these places?
We had arrived by sea on board the M.S Endeavour and had heard the previous day about how archaeologists now think in terms of cultural diffusion to explain how Bronze Age culture spread through the Mediterranean and up the western seaways of Europe’s Atlantic coast to the far North. As our travels so often remind us, there are many interconnections to celebrate and no better place to do so than on board our expedition ship.
