For the better part of the 20th century, Swedish hillforts were seen strictly as an iron age phenomenon, and it was not until the mid-1980’s that we had reliable evidence that hillforts were already constructed during the Bronze Age. At the same time, archaeologists were moving away from the old militaristic studies to make way for studies based on the symbolical aspects of these monumental structures. Unfortunately, as we reached the end of the millennium, the general archaeological interest for hillforts dramatically dropped, causing hillfort research to miss out on the digital revolution as the new GIS technology cemented itself as a powerful tool in archaeological research. Today, nine hillforts have received a Bronze Age dating, why it is now possible to preform high quality research on the material without having to include structures from other time periods. However, the lack of GIS-based hillfort research leads us to seek inspiration from British hillfort research where the incorporation of GIS-methodology has proven successful in analyzing the relationship between hillforts and their landscapes. The purpose of this paper is therefore to continue investigating the symbolical aspects of the Swedish Bronze Age hillforts by investigating how GIS can help us locate and understand visual relationship between hillfort morphology and the surrounding landscape.       The analysis is based on a viewshed-method developed by Jessica Murray in her attempts to analyze if hillforts were constructed to visually relate to certain features of the landscape or the local topography. The resulting viewshed rasters are interpreted from a phenomenological theoretical standpoint since phenomenological aspects give us the possibility to bridge the gap between digital and analogue sensory analysis. The results show that viewshed-based analyses can be successfully complimented by phenomenological theory and that the method has successfully replicated previously observed landscape relationships while also exposing previously unknown visual relationships.

This paper deals with hill-forts located on and directly south of Selaön, in the center of Mälardalen, Södermanland, dated to the late roman period and the migration period. Of special interest is differences and similarities between the forts when it comes to their morphology and the hills where they were built. Furthermore, their landscape has been examined and I have tried to put the hill-forts in relation to any iron age settlements.

The function and symbolism of the Swedish bronze age rampart enclosures has been debated since the late 1800´s. Arguments highlighting their function as fortifications and/ or as ritual centres has been passed back and forth in what today seems to be a subject in a standstill. Very little has been done in comparing the Swedish enclosures with their European equivalents when it comes to the understanding of function. In the early 1990´s their origin in the Lausitz culture of the Late Bronze Age was put forth by several archaeologists, but one needs to keep in mind that this was a time where the Lausitz culture was an increasingly popular subject for Swedish archaeologists to study. In time the similarities between the materials came to be questioned from both an architectural and a chronological standpoint. This paper has therefore been focused on re-examining the Swedish rampart enclosures relation to the European hill forts and fortified settlements. By examining its relations to the import of bronze and ceramics between the southern and eastern coastal areas of the Baltic Sea area and Scandinavia around 1300­-1000 BC, my main goal was to provide an updated and valid theory for the origins of the earliest Swedish rampart enclosures from the same time. Based on the analysis presented in this paper I have, to some extent, been able to distance the earliest Swedish rampart enclosures from the previous Lausitz origin theory. The conclusion is instead that an origin is to be sought in the earlier Únětice culture and it´s rampart fortified settlements from between 1800-1500 BC.