This essay will discuss where the people who built the passage graves and the first farmers at the Falbygden area in Sweden came from. That the first farmers built the passage graves is today a given fact, but how did the Neolithic transition take form in Scandinavia? Two theories have been put forward over the past century, that they learned through cultural diffusion, or that the first farmers were immigrants. Recent DNA- and Strontiumanalyses have been made on skeletons from passage graves from Falbygden and on skeletons from different regions across Europe, both from Mesolithic and Neolithic people. These results show that the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers shares no or little continuity with the Neolithic farmers, even in cases where the two groups lived in close neighbouring for a long time.

This essay is focused on the re-use during the Bronze Age of the Stone Age passage grave RAÄ 85 in Mysinge, Öland. To increase the knowledge of the phenomena of re-use in general and that which occurred in Mysinge passage grave in particular I’ve looked at other forms of re-use on Öland and the re-use of passage graves in Falbygden. The research has been limited to the Bronze Age. My goal has been to see what this might tell us about the relationship people during the Bronze Age had towards the abstract subject of “non-existence”, in other words death. The research clearly shows that Mysinge passage grave is the oldest grave that were in use during the Bronze Age as a grave, of those known to us, with 1/3 of its dated burials dated to the first half of the Bronze Age and the earliest to early Neolithic. This makes the other three megalithic tombs in the area very interesting since none of them has been excavated. The other forms of re-use of graves that were observed in Öland during the Bronze Age were all later covered by a cairn or a stone packing of some sorts. This most often occurred during the late Bronze Age. However, subsequent burials continued after the construction of the cairn/stone packing throughout the Bronze Age and in most cases into the Iron Age. The cairns/stone packings have a lot in common with the entrance cairn at Mysinge passage grave which also seems to have been constructed during the late Bronze Age. However, while cairns/stone packings mark endings of something they at the same time are monuments of today and are continually being used as a grave (but now according to local burial customs). Entrance cairns on the other hand first and foremost mark endings of something, even though these endings are most likely meant to be remembered. None of the passage graves analysed in this essay in Falbygden indicate the same use of the chamber as Mysinge passage grave. With a few exceptions (Rössberga Rör and Norra Lundby 41) the chamber seems to generally stop being used during Late Neolithic and during the Bronze Age and Iron Age secondary burials in the surrounding mound is instead common. However, it mainly seems to occur during the late Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. Not a single grave in the mound indicate a early Bronze Age date. It is clear that the past often had an important role in the relationship to death and burials during the Bronze Age.