<p>This thesis discusses South Scandinavian cup marks in general, and cup marks in Kronobergs County in particular. The question is whether the cup mark phenomena can be viewed as an ordinary family-based cult for a kind of everyday use, or more likely as a community passage ritual. The thesis also suggests that cup marks were made by ritual participants in, or in the process of trying to reach, an altered state of consciousness.</p>

This thesis discusses South Scandinavian cup marks in general, and cup marks in Kronobergs County in particular. The question is whether the cup mark phenomena can be viewed as an ordinary family-based cult for a kind of everyday use, or more likely as a community passage ritual. The thesis also suggests that cup marks were made by ritual participants in, or in the process of trying to reach, an altered state of consciousness.

Cup marks are often described in historical records as belonging to the fairies of Swedish folklore, hence going under the name “fairy mills” or “elf mills” (in Swedish älvkvarn). The name derives from the belief that the fairies used the cups as their mills for grinding seed. There are many different theories as to what the original purpose behind the creation of the cup marks are, but the only thing that we know is that humans began creating them during the Stone Age and continued doing so throughout the Bronze Age and maybe even during the earlier years of the Iron Age. The purpose of this paper is to compare the theories concerning the creation of the cup marks with the later traditions surrounding the fairy/elf mills to see if there are any connections. The fairies were small, underground humanlike creatures who, if disturbed by humans, would “blow” a sickness upon them. To get rid of the sickness one method was to visit a fairymill and sacrifice a small item, usually a coin or needle, and to grease the fairy mill in order to become friendly with the fairies again so that they would lift the sickness. One theory is that the use and meaning of the cup marks went through a change between the Neolithic era and the Bronze Age, going from having a more ritual and ceremonial meaning to a more common one where they would be used by the ordinary people as well. This theory, along with others, has proven insightful in the discussion and may very well be a piece in the overall picture concerning the cup marks and their possibly different meanings through time. Dalarna in Sweden represents the line between the cup mark rich lands to the south, and the northern parts where cup marks barely exist. Dalarna itself does only contain about 20 cup mark locations and yet the fairy traditions are described as strong there. It has been shown that naturally formed rocks and potholes (“giant's kettle” if translated directly from Swedish) could have played a big role, presenting the conclusion that not only the cup marks were associated with fairies, widening the definition of a fairy mill.

The cup marks are the most common form of rock art in Scandinavia and they have been dated from the Mesolithic to the Migration period. In Sweden they are mostly found in the southern parts of the country. They are believed to generally have been made by permanently resident agrarian people from the Bronze age. The question about the cup marks origin and purpose is one of the unanswered questions in Scandinavian rock art research, which this essay has had the goal to answer with a holistic, statistical analysis based on all the registered cup marks in Sweden. Furthermore, the cup marks have been investigated in correlation with other ancient remains to see if there are patterns in the landscape that could indicate the cup marks purpose. The analysis confirmed that most of the cup marks probably where made by a permanent resident agrarian people on land mostly close to water, and that there seems to have been central places in the south of Sweden where different ancient remains have been made in clusters. No uniform meaning about the cup marks could be found with this method, but the research showed that with more detailed research about cup mark sites combined with a wider perspective about the entire cup marks placings in the landscape, new research will probably be able to get closer to an answer about the cup marks purpose and use in the Norse landscape.