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The Uppåkra Fragments

Uppåkra is a Central Iron Age site in Southern Sweden and is situated approximately 5 km south of Lund.

The site at Uppåkra was first recognized in 1934 in connection with house constructions but the most recent finding are from an investigation of the site in 1996-97. During this time the are was given a good scouring with metal detectors. In doing so archaeologists uncovered over 3000 items of bronze, silver and gold. The dating of these pieces has ranged from the Vendel Period to well into the "Viking" Age (ca 55 - 1000 AD). Unfortunately due to extensive farming of the area most of the layers above what would be early Iron Age are lost forever. Its hard to believe that had the investigation been put off for a few more years (or forever), even the little information we have on this area may have also been lost to the plow.

As this is a relatively new find, I have not been able to uncover much information on it in text form.

The photo below came from a web based journal called "artefact". It's in Swedish only, and I can't find the original article on the site anymore so that means they've probably taken it off their server.

The find isn't that thoroughly web-published in English yet; and I have a person "in the know" that is keeping his eyes open for anything that might shows up eventually. Roughly it can be said that they interpret the building, outside of which the brow-piece etc was found, as a "temple". It's rather small, but very high (enormous post-holes).

There is an older site on Uppåkra that hasn't been updated for years: Its at http://www.ark.lu.se/uppakra/index.htm

Click on the pic to see a bigger version.