Tacitus described (c.98 CE) a ritual involving a cattle-drawn vehicle that carried a numen of Mother Earth. The disc wheel sacrificed at Rappendam, Seeland c.150 CE, was the youngest of some 40 specimens dating back to c.300 BCE.

Ritual procession with a cart may well have originated about 3,500 BCE in northern Europe as animal traction – an innovative complex that included plows, sledges and wheeled vehicles ¬– gained widespread use. It transformed food cropping, transportation and communication between different areas, and gave rise to new rituals.

As early as 4,000 BCE, ard marks, from ‘scratch’ plows drawn by oxen, are known all over South Scandinavia. Late in the 4th millennium BCE, symbols of yoked cattle, seen as early representations of a Nerthus cult, were inscribed in a communal gallery-grave in Züschen, Germany. Flintbek LA 3, a barrow near Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, constructed during about a century and a half until 3360 BCE, encodes within it funeral observances with both plow and cart, and possibly a procession. Thus, Flintbek recorded rituals of cart and plow in the same monument. More than 200 stendyngegrave, “stoneheap graves,” entailing the burial of cattle pulling a cart bearing a deceased, were dedicated around 3000 BCE in Northern Jutland,

Over time, traction-complex materials and art began to be featured in non-mortuary contexts. Sacrifices of wagon and plow materials in areas of current Denmark and northern Europe continued for millennia, and, including some Dejberg-type wagons in bogs, were still being made at the beginning of the 1st millennium CE.

Many of the ceremonies H.M. Chadwick ascribed to the Cult of Nerthus “in ancient and modern times” are connected with the northern European areas of traction-complex sacrificial deposits.

First Author: Frank Battaglia

Keywords:
Traction complex
Neolithic barrow
Stendyngegrav
Procession
Sacrifice
Settlement/wetland deposit