No description available.

This paper studies the stone towers on Gotland which are known as kastal in Swedish. This paper aims to answer the question of why they were built and also who ordered their construction. In order to answer these questions, the aim of this paper is to contextualise the kastal by understanding their construction chronology. In order to accomplish this, both the activities and the political actions that have been linked to the kastal by other scholars and analysed. Those activities include trade, Medieval ideologies, the Baltic crusades and residential farms. A case study is also made through researching the kastal's function, form,age and the artefacts found within them. The research conducted here indicates that no clear originator can be determined , although it is clear that some social organisation was the driving force behind the building phase. This is seen for example at Bulverket, a wooden fort built in Lake Tingstäde in northern Gotland during the twelfth century, showing the Gotlanders were able to organise and coordinate building structures on a massive scale. Whether this organisation was formed around a single aristocratic individual or around a collective group, cannot be determined within this paper. It seems that no direct link can be said to place all the kastal within one unified phase or singular incident. However, the differnet activities analysed in this research could have had a significant impact in the construction of the towers.