This thesis discusses aspects of how the Late Neolithic society in southern Sweden changed through the use of metal. Particular focus is on how the different categories of the material culture were utilized in this process – the Late Neolithic flint daggers and objects of stone imitating objects of metal. The presence of metal in the Late Neolithic society is discussed and explicated by the correlation of metal objects to objects imitating metal. Imitations are not perceived as passive copies, but as a continuing dialogue between artefacts. These imitations are viewed as filling a function wherein they help to prepare society to express social and political processes in a different material, as a way to meet and relate to the new world-view that the metal objects implied through their existence. The difference between resharpened and non-resharpened flint daggers is explored through a variety of quantitative and qualitative analyses. There appears to have been two differing rules of deposition of the two types of flint daggers in the Late Neolithic society. Resharpened and non-resharpened flint daggers thus seem to relate to different societal spheres of significance in society. It is suggested that the flint daggers were used in varying forms of ritual body modification practices, as tools for alteration of bodily appearance. These rituals can be termed passage rituals – rituals connected to the individual’s journey through her life-cycle. The resharpening of the dagger blade is then to be understood as a ceremonial resharpening, a ritual remaking of the dagger. During the Late Neolithic, gallery graves, mortuary houses and votive offerings were used to express a connection to an older, ancestral ideology, based on communal rituals. At the same time a new ideology was expressed through the use of individual earth graves and ritual body modification practices. The human body, previously attributed an ancestral role, was now used as a medium of classification, signification and individual expression. The ritual practice works both as a societal regulator and as a way for individuals to express themselves in relation to others. The ritual body modification practices, manifested in different rituals of passage, may have been a way for individuals to relate to the changes in society during the course of the Late Neolithic.

Au sein du vaste phénomène pan-européen de l’émergence de nombreuses sépultures collectives apparaissent à partir de la deuxième moitié du 4e millénaire av. J.-C. des structures dites allées sépulcrales dans deux régions distinctes, notamment en Hesse et Westphalie, dans le Bassin parisien et avec de faibles effectifs en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas. Ces caveaux de matériaux diverses et de forme rectangulaire sont organisés en une antichambre courte réservée au dépôt de mobiliers collectifs et en une vaste chambre funéraire réservée aux dépôts successifs de nombreux défunts. Les similitudes architecturales entre les structures de ces deux aires géographiques furent reconnues dès le 20ème siècle et la nature de leurs liens a été dès lors interrogée à partir de perspectives diffusionnistes. La trajectoire d’influences unilinéaires varia au cours du temps en fonction du progrès des méthodes et de la mise en œuvre de datations par le radiocarbone. Ce travail s’est penché une fois de plus sur cette question, en effectuant une analyse comparative à deux niveaux: une comparaison empirique de toutes les tombes recensées afin de vérifier en quoi les structures collectives correspondent effectivement à un stéréotype architectural et afin de saisir les variations potentielles entre elles sur le plan régional, et d’autre part une comparaison qualitative de trois Galeriegräber et six allées sépulcrales afin de déceler à quel degré leurs modes de fonctionnement convergent ou diffèrent en fonction d’aspects architecturaux distincts et régionaux. Ce travail interroge enfin la manière dont on peut considérer ces tombes comme les vestiges d’une idéologie partagée de la mort. / Amidst the pan-European phenomenon of the rise of numerous collective burials in the second half of the 4th millennium BC appear so-called gallery graves in two distinct regions, notably in Hessia and Westphalia, in the Paris Basin, and in scarce numbers also in Belgium and the Netherlands. These collective burial vaults of diverse construction materials and of rectangular shape are organised in a short antechamber reserved to the deposit of collective grave good assemblages and in a long chamber sheltering numerous deceased individuals, which were deposited successively. The similarities of the structures of both main study regions in terms of architecture were already noted since the 20th century and the nature of the ties binding latter have since then been interrogated in the line of diffusionist approaches. The resulting presumptions of the direction of unilinear diffusionist processes changed according to the progress of dating methods and processing of radiocarbon samples. With the present research work, the issue was revived anew, and this time via a twofold comparative analysis: A first, empirical comparative analysis is destined to check at what level the collective structures correspond to a structural stereotype and to inform us in terms of potentially regional variations. A second, qualitative comparison included three Galeriegräber and six allées sépulcrales in order to determine to what degree their uses conferred or differed according to distinct architectural and regional features. The resulting observations are finally argued jointly concerning to what extent we finally can consider them the remains of a shared ideology of death.