How did changing cosmologies influence mortuary practices as groups in Northern Europe transitioned from foraging to farming?

This dissertation investigates ancient cosmological transformation and the influences on mortuary practices in the transitional period from foraging to farming. The dawn of Neolithic society across the southern Scandinavian region should have changed the existing social lifestyles and burial practices, but how did people create new burial systems and shift to them? New burial activities in rituals mean the potential changes of attitudes towards the dead and death, linking to transforming the conventional cosmology. These features can be explored in archaeological contexts by focusing on human activities in mortuary rituals through burial-related records, such as offering grave goods and food.

Data analysis represents the separation from inhumations in the late Mesolithic to other two mortuary methods in the early Neolithic, such as earthen long barrows and bog burials. However, the LM inhumations could also show some features of human attitudes towards the dead and death seen in these two burials (such as veneration for the ancestors by performing burial rituals in a specific place and a strong correlation between females and young individuals). These results suggest that the EN burial practices were not dramatic changes in ancient cosmology from the preceding period; rather, some powerful factors such as environmental change likely provoked people to shift to new Neolithic burial practices. Particularly, the sea level fluctuation in the transitional periods could influence the existing ecosystem and social organisations, which might be a plausible event that altered human activities in burial rituals. That is to say, environmental changes probably led to transforming ancient cosmology, which contributed to creating new burial systems that could meet the new social lifestyle.