Bronze Age Pictographs and Modern Vikings
Thursday, 1. August 2019--
After a morning of shopping during which an elderly woman and a foreign-born (Ethiopian-?) shop assistant asked me for help (and for which my Swedish skills were sharply tested!), the family took Zuza and me to a Bronze Age settlement and outdoor museum at Tanumshede. Here is the Vitlycke Museum, which is on the UNESCO heritage list. Basically, it was a museum featuring a reconstruction of a 3,000-year-old village. So here you can see what life was like a heck of a long time ago. Bear in mind, people kept animals in their homes back then--and I don't mean just cats and dogs. Imagine having your livestock living with you! I'm pretty sure they didn't have air freshener back then.
Inside the museum was a cafe which was serving lunch. Like many eating establishments I've seen so far, it was buffet-style, or, as we often say in English, a smorgasbord. (Smörgås, by the way, means sandwich.) There were on;y two main choices: baked salmon with potatoes or chicken with potatoes. I'm not a fish eater so I opted for the chicken, which was nice because it came with a brunsås or a brown sauce, not unlike that served with köttbullar (Swedish meatballs). In fact, the whole place had that "Swedish-meatballs-in-the-upstairs-restaurant-in-IKEA" sort of smell, you know what I mean? And they offered salad, which was quartered tomatoes with chickpeas, black beans, and edamame beans. Yum!
But here I witnessed quite the family. A large woman, who I decided was probably named Brunhildegard, had curly-reddish hair, shaved on one side of her head. She sported Birkenstock sandals, and a long, linen dress like they might have worn in the Medieval period, if not earlier, and Ray-ban glasses. I wondered if she might be taking part in some kind of historical reenactment. Her equally large husband had a shaved head and sported a beard, several tattoos, and had a biker or Gothic rock T-shirt. (I couldn't quite see the design.) The kids wore similar linen clothing and had hair dyed pink and green. They were the modern Viking family, a page right in history.
After lunch, we walked uphill to a bunch of rocks with strange carvings in them. Archaeologists had painstakingly painted them red so they'd show up, otherwise, they were not so visible. It was interesting to speculate what these people so many eons ago were trying to communicate. The hunt? A funeral? A wolf attack? Trade with other civilizations? Og was here? In many ways, I think we've come back full-circle when you look at all the emoticons we use in text messaging in place of proper written language.