Keep your head high: skulls on stakes and cranial trauma in Mesolithic Sweden Sara Gummesson 1 , Fredrik Hallgren 2 & Anna Kjellström 1, ∗ The socio-cultural behaviour of Scandina- vian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers has been difficult to understand due to the dearth of sites thus far investigated. Recent excava- tions at Kanaljorden in Sweden, however, have revealed disarticulated human crania intentionally placed at the bottom of a former lake. The adult crania exhibited antemortem blunt force trauma patterns differentiated by sex that were probably the result of interpersonal violence; the remains of wooden stakes were recovered inside two crania, indicating that they had been mounted. Taphonomic factors suggest that the human bodies were manipulated prior to deposition. This unique site challenges our understanding of the handling of the dead during the European Mesolithic. Keywords: Sweden, Mesolithic, burial practices, non-lethal violence, blunt force trauma Introduction Middle and Late Mesolithic Scandinavia (c. 9000–6000 cal BP) was populated by mobile or semi-sedentary groups subsisting by hunting, fishing and gathering. Only approximately 200 human burials dating to this 3000-year period have been investigated in Scandinavia, and knowledge of socio-cultural behaviours is limited. Mesolithic mortuary practices in the region are dominated by inhumation burials, often forming clusters, such as at Vedbæk, Denmark and Skateholm, southern Sweden (Larsson 1988, 2000; Brinch Petersen 2015; Sjögren & Ahlström 2016). Of the approximately 250 known European burial sites (comprising around 2200 individuals), two-thirds have only one or two 1 Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm SE-106 91, Sweden 2 The Cultural Heritage Foundation, Stora Gatan 41, Västerås SE-722 12, Sweden ∗ Author for correspondence (Email: anna.kjellstrom@ofl.su.se) © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2018 antiquity 92 361 (2018): 74–90 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.210 74 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.210 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Stockholm University Library, on 13 Feb 2018 at 08:17:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,