THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CAIRNS AND SETTLEMENT SITES

Summary. This article discusses the problem of how to relate a special grave construction to a particular settlement site. An example from the West Swedish Bronze Age is presented to pinpoint the difficulties of the chronological criteria and the drawbacks of using ‘nearness’ as a criterion. The idea presented is that a relationship between a grave monument and a settlement site may be reflected in areas where the building material, the stones, were picked up. Such areas can be demonstrated in a test example from West Sweden, which showed that, under special circumstances, such a link may be valuable for solving the problem of how to relate a cairn to a settlement site.