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| A full English version of this website is not available at the moment. Here is a short introduction to the rock carvings of Bornholm, giving a little background before you enjoy the image gallery. The left menu is so far linking to pages with text in Danish but with a lot of photos. |
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Bornholm is a Danish island situated in the Baltic Sea, at the south-east corner of Sweden.
The northern part of Bornholm is by far the most important rock carving area in Denmark. In a Scandinavian perspective the island is one regional centre of rock carvings among several others. The carvings of Bornholm can’t match the tremendous rock art in Bohuslän and Østfold, neither in number nor in the variety of motives. Anyway, some of the sites are of international interest.
The coast of Scania, which can be seen from Bornholm 40 km away, is another rock carving centre and a rich Bronze Age area in general. Surely, there have been connections across the Baltic. Open sea paddling was nothing new at the time. Nevertheless it is remarkable that most Scanian carvings are from early Bronze Age, carried out many generations earlier than the peak period of carving traditions
on Bornholm.
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On Bornholm, the most common carvings are cupmarks, which is simply small hollow marks, generally 4-6 cm in diameter and from a few millimetres to some centimetres in depth. Several hundred sites are known all over the island. Many of them show only a handful of cupmarks, others more than a hundred.
Cupmarks are in general not possible to date. Real images being a Bronze Age phenomenon, the making of cupmarks probably began in late Stone Age (Megalithic culture) and continue into pre-Roman Iron Age.
Boat images are the second most common carvings. They occur at 23 sites, with around 120 single images. Many new sites have been discovered resently. (see image gallery) The boat carvings can be dated to late Bronze Age (between 1100 and 500 B.C.), like most rock carvings in southern Scandinavia. Like in Bohuslän a few ship motives seem to be from early Iron Age. Rock images of boats are mainly dated by comparison with miniature boat images on bronze razors, which are found in graves in Denmark and southern Sweden.
Other signs - as wheels or foot images - can often be closely connected to boats, and should be contemporary. When found only with cupmarks the dating of these motives is more obscure.
> Excavations - Bornholm at the reserarch front
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