2,500-year-old rare rings discovered at ‘unique’ Late Bronze Age site in Sweden

As archaeologists were conducting a routine excavation before the construction of a planned housing development, they stumbled upon an astonishing discovery: a Late Bronze Age site that captured a world in transition.

Uncovering a collection of bones deposited in various ways, they found some of these remains in an urn, while others were placed in small pits in the ground or scattered about.

On the eastern edge of the grave, archaeologists spotted bits of bronze in the earth, one of the standout discoveries from what would become a massive archaeological find.

These braided bronze neck rings, or wendel rings, were described as a rare find from the Late Bronze Age to begin with, but this specific setting renders them practically unique.

“Finding them in a setting like this is highly unusual, perhaps unique,” says Alf Ericsson, the project manager.

A Late Bronze Age grave site

East of Norrköping, Marby might have a slight population of 308 people, but the serene Swedish town has been making international headlines recently in light of a couple of major archaeological discoveries. This is one of them.

The land upon which a housing development would be built looked like nothing more than an ordinary wooded hillside, but inside, over the past few weeks, archaeologists found graves, rock carvings, and settlement remains from the Late Bronze Age.

Though bronze objects had been found previously, with other Wendel rings reported surfacing nearby, neck rings are typically found buried with other goods or in hoards. The artifacts at Marby were instead found together in a stone setting with a central block, according to Arkeonews. Archaeologists called this placement within a grave monument a ritual offering with cremated human remains.

A world about to turn Iron

The Swedish History Museum explained that this extraordinary Late Bronze Age grave captures a moment in time when funerary rites began to change.

As the rings were two extraordinary objects recovered from a larger discovery, archaeologists reported that they also identified the remains of houses and two burnt mounds.

And though there is nothing immediately exciting about “a mound,” archaeologists are still learning about how they were used.

Were they the products of waste, or ancient trash cans, from someone’s house? It turns out that they might appear simple, but they served a variety of functions. Archaeologists are just beginning to understand how complex these mounds were.

Yes, they were deposits for trash, but at Marby, one burnt mound was transformed, Arkeonews wrote, into a grave monument. Archaeologists described that as unusual. Another mound contained fire-cracked stone and pottery fragments, and was associated with a house that had caught fire thousands of years ago.

At Marby, situated close to the sea with a rich history of ancient vessels traveling along these shores, they dug up an ancient site from the Late Bronze Age where they captured a glimpse of what life was like, offering unique perspectives that are enriching their understanding of this moment in time, as per Cision.

Archaeologists explained that the Late Bronze Age marked a transition as humans moved into the Iron Age. Monumental mound traditions declined. The Marby grave brings together cremation, a stone monument, and this ritualistic deposit of bronze objects, which is synonymous with the end of this era when the treatment and use of bronze objects changed—often left in hoards on land or in water, sometimes as offerings to gods or divinities. It was the end of the Bronze Age.