Lustrupholm – Et brandgravfelt fra ældre bronzealder under flad mark

Lustrupholm A flat cremation cemetery from the early Bronze Age Bronze Age burial custom is usually associated with large burial mounds containing rich inhumation graves. However, this picture of the burial custom in the Bronze Age is now complemented by an important find from Lustrupholm (fig. 1), which differs from theusual picture in a number of ways, as we are here dealing with a flat cremation cemetery from the early Bronze Age. Twenty-three cremation graves were detected (fig. 2), seventeen of which were concent rated in the same area with out overlapping.At a distance of between nine and nineteen meters from this concentration, six more graves creating an almost complete semicircle with a diameter of c. 30 meters were in vestigated. The seventeen graves in the concentration were positioned a little off the centre of the semicircle. The graves were found underneath a late Roman/early Germanic Iron Age settlement, and the graves are not likely to have been covered by one or more mounds. Thus, they should be considered flat cremation graves. The twenty-three graves give an interesting picture of early Bronze Age cremation practice (fig. 3-10). With the exception of two, all graves were generally small burials with room for just the burnt bones, perhaps an urn, and grave goods. The two remaining graves had the shape of inhumation burials (fig. 11). In seven or eight of the graves, the urn was a clay vessel, whereas in eight cases, the cremated bones seem to have bee n buried in a container made from organic material. To judge from the form and size of the compact burn bones – which to a higher or lesser degree reveal the shape of the container – the containers were made from bark. The pottery, consisting of two sacrificial clay vessels and seven or eight pottery urns, is very vari d and com prises large and small vessels, finely processed, burnished vessels, and coarser, coil-built vessels. Pottery occurs in graves from the early Bronze Age, but nine clay vessels – as is the case her – from the same site is an unusually large number. Seven graves contained bronze grave goods. Some of the grave goods had obviously been on the funeral pyreas they have melt ed co mple tely o r partly. O thers are un­ dam age d. T he grave goo ds cann o t be used for determining the sex of the buried person, as all the identifiable objects are of types that occur in both men’s and women’s graves. The amount of bronze in the individual graves is small, from 1 to 187 grams (a