Europe's Cultural Landscape: archaeologists and the management of change Edited by Graham Fairclough and Stephen Rippon

The Bjäre peninsula, situated in the north-west ofSkåne, has a rich cultural landscape marked by distinct Bronze Age monuments, enclosed field systems dating from the 19 century and various notable changes and consistencies in settlement pattern. This paper discusses the creation of the landscape and the relationships within it, the significance of the past to the modern landscape, the threats to the cultural landscape and the possible solutions and approaches to these solutions. The landscape of today The Bjäre peninsula is situated in the north-west of Skåne, the southernmost county of Sweden (fig. 16.1). In all the area consists of seven parishes and measures about 200km. About 14,000 BC the ice of the last Ice Age began melting and this area was one of the first parts of Scandinavia to be freed from the big ice-sheet. The enormous masses of ice had reshaped the area and these shapes have brought a special appearance to the region. In the north of the peninsula the old rock survived the Ice Age and it is still rising with heights of about 200m above sea level The prehistoric heritage of Bjäre is very well-preserved and mainly consists of an unusually high density of Bronze Age graves and cupmark sites (fig. 16.2). More than 700 mounds from the Bronze Age are known, and almost as many stone-settings from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, as well as several hundred cupmarks sites. The larger carving sites also contain footprints and nonfigurative carvings. The first figurative carvings have only recently been found on the peninsula illustrating a boat, some fishing hooks and horse hoofs (Broström & Ihrestam, forthcoming). On the burial mounds we also find another kind of heritage from the past, in the set of vegetation growing on them. An inventory has shown that the vegetation on the mounds of Bjäre is extremely well-preserved and representative of the time before artificial fertilisers were used. It is a flora typical of managed grassland. Analysis has shown that some of the vegetation may actually originate from the time when the mounds were built (Gustafsson 1998). There are very few visible remains of earlier or later prehistoric date, and the pre-historic layers of visible remains of human activity in the landscape may therefore be summarised as a well-preserved ritual landscape from the Bronze Age period. Around these, however, many layers of later farming landscapes have evolved. The landscape of today mainly consists of open arable fields and grazing land with few clearly visible boundaries Fig. 16.1: Location of the Bjäre peninsula, Sweden.