SACRIFICE AND BURIAL CUSTOMS IN THE FUNNEL BEAKER CULTURE
The Funnel Cup Culture is the early farming culture from around 4,000-2,88 BC and is named after the culture’s special clay cups with funnel-shaped necks.
From Salling, Fur and Fjends, Museum Salling has around 300 unprocessed and unpublished finds from the Funnel Beaker Culture.
In wet soil, including bogs, axes, a few clay vessels and some very beautiful amber beads have been found – including the famous find from Mollerup, where a clay vessel was found with a huge treasure in the form of 13,000 amber beads.
On land, four sites have been discovered in recent years with around 200 small pits containing broken clay vessels and burnt flint objects. There are also a few pits with pottery and flint, sacrificial finds at passage graves, and a previously unnoticed fortified site at Nr. Søby.
Within the burial customs – with Early and Middle Neolithic wood-built earth graves, stone-built passage graves and the mysterious stone dune graves – there is a lot of material. It tells us about the Funnel Beaker culture’s relationship with the family, the dead and the ritual world. The only known local excavation is the “Volling grave” – excavated by an amateur archaeologist in 1938. Both Danish and foreign archaeologists use terms like “Volling pottery” and “Volling group” to describe a Jutlandic time period in the early Neolithic period. That’s why it’s important to get to grips with what kind of plant actually produced the Volling find.
