This is a study of the parishes, surrounding the lake Runnviken in the County of Södermanland in Sweden, to investigate the development of the society from the Middle Iron Age, through the Viking Age to early Medieval Period. The study is trying to find an answer to the question - was it the same central places/farms that once had built the hillforts in the middle iron age, that also have built the first churches in the Early Medieval Period.

The archaeological research that has previously been conducted regarding Swedish medieval ports is not particularly extensive. Regarding ports in medieval urban environments, Swedish research has been described as barely existent. A possible explanation for this can be that very few archaeological investigations have been carried out in coastal, urban environments. In recent years, increased exploitation pressure in Central Sweden has led to several major urban archaeological investigations in coastal environments. A difficulty for research on port facilitiesis that piers and quay facilities can be difficult to identify in the archaeological material. Another problem with the medieval ports is that they seem to be trapped in a borderland between maritime archaeology and "dry land archaeology".  Between the years 2010 and 2011 archaeological investigations were carried out within the Åkroken district. The investigations confirmed the location of Nyköpings medieval port. During the investigations in the riverbank, remains from piers and quay structures emerged. Based on this material the present study aims to discuss the medieval harbor. The material from Åkroken in Nyköping will be compared with archaeological material from two other medieval cities, namely Stockholm and Kalmar.

In stone-age archaeology, fish are often underestimated as important food source because fishbonesare often lost during excavations due to inappropriate methodology or poor preservation conditions. To understand fisheries at archaeological sites, it is critically important to understand the fish in relation to the ecology and the fishing sites. The aim of the thesis was to understand perch and pikefishing at the Pitted Ware site at Korsnäs in eastern central Sweden. An in-depth study of the Korsnäs fishbone assemblage was performed to calculate the perch and pike from regression formulas based on available reference data. The main results indicated specific size classes of perch between 27 – 40cm while the pike were mostly common between 50 – 75cm. Studies of perch scales indicated that they were fished during summer and annual ring observations on perch vertebrae showed several 4 –year old individuals, a common age for spawning perch. The results of the fishbone analysis have shown their potential to reconstruct fishing strategies, ecological conditions and the aspects of fish, fishermen and fishing in more detail. The size trend of the fishes indicates several factors regarding the fishermen of the Pitted Ware Culture and their specific knowledge of fish. The results suggests that various fishing strategies were used for different kinds of fish at the Korsnäs site. The size distributions of fish reflects the underlying planning and managements for optimized fisheries. These people were not fishermen, they were specialized fishermen.

Nätra was one of the larger parishes in Västernorrland during the Middle Ages and have a ruin of an medieval church next to Nätraån in height with Bjästa, which during medieval times served as a gathering place for the surrounding villages. If you look at registered settlements, there are no remains that prove that Nätra have had permanent iron age settlements. Has Nätra been uninhabited before the medieval church was built? Where did the Iron Age go? The work intends to investigate which indicators there is for Nätra to have been inhabited during the Iron Age - with the medieval church as the entry point.

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The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how economic and social status is demonstrated on a number of runestones that were erected sometime during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages in Uppsala Province and how these factors can be linked to today's use of social media. The aspect of the differences and similarities between the erection of the runestones and the present use of social media is also discussed. The essay has analyzed various factors such as the location of the runestones, runic writing and ornamentation. The essay was carried out partly through a literature study based on scientific texts and partly through a semiotic image analysis where the runestones are analyzed based on the concepts of denotation and connotation. Based on the analysis that has been carried out, there are several aspects that show how economic and social status is based on their location, runic writing and ornamentation. For example, runestones with longer runic writing and richer ornamentation are considered to have elevated status. When it comes to the similarities and differences that exist between the erection of the runestones and today's social media, it is mainly about what resources have been used and how the content itself, that is, how the message has been designed.

The aim of this essay is to assess the concept of Lifecycle analysis (LCA) usually used in environmental impact assessments as a tool to study archaeological remains over time, to test the concept on the 17th warship Vasa and to study the potential of the concept in heritage management. The lifecycle approach, even called biography or life-history in the literature, shows the interaction between the, in this case, the Vasa ship, and the surrounding society prevail over time, acquiring different meanings depending of a multitude of context and stakeholders in different time periods since the conception of the ship to today's ship at a museum. It also shows that Vasa had and have many possible biographies. The concept earlier used on i.e. monuments, is well applicable on ships not visible in the landscape and displays other aspects not visible in a traditional archaeological study. The use of the concept can both enrich the archaeological interpretation, the discipline it self and the heritage management.

In this paper I will research whether or not bone depositions in water from the bronze age have a common feature in purpose of identifying undiscovered depositions. I will study six different places in Uppland, Sweden and go through the amount and the different types of ancient monuments adjacent to the depositions to try to find a pattern. With the knowledge I gather I will discuss how the results can help archeologists to identify new potential deposition locations. The result of this paper was that the studied locations were too few to find a real pattern to identify new depositions. I’m hopeful with a larger study done on a wider geographical area with more locations that a pattern will be identified.