In Atapuerca there are animals, in Irulegi there is a hand and in Lake Mälaren, in central-eastern Sweden, there are feet. Thousands of footprints carved into rock that are between 2,500 and 3,700 years old. To date, archeology thought that they were a sample of symbolic or religious art, but a recent study proposes something much more practical and not at all ornamental: they were contracts engraved in stone.
Take off your shoes and sign here. Fredrik Fahlander, an archaeologist at Stockholm University, has examined hundreds of footprints carved into rock surfaces along the southern coasts of the Scandinavian peninsula and has found that these petroglyphs are not placed at random nor do they belong to the same person, like when you mess around with fresh cement.
So that it lasts, exactly like the contracts. In fact, that is their hypothesis: when two people wanted to seal an agreement, a friendship or a marriage, they engraved their footprints together on the rock. Faced with the oral promise, the stone made it permanent.
Map of southern Scandinavia where carved footprints have been found. Fredrik Fahlander
Why is it important. Because they offer a different vision than what we know about how prehistoric societies worked. Historically we have assumed that formal pacts were typical of cultures with writing, but this study shows that peoples without writing could also formalize commitments using the physical landscape as support.
On the other hand, as important as knowing what those footprints mean is knowing what they were not: in the Scandinavian Bronze Age, the sacred and the symbolic was engraved in bronze and deposited in tombs and the foot prints are not in either of those two places. They appear only and exclusively on rock exposed to water. It is no coincidence: it reveals that these traces did not belong to the world of the dead or to that of symbology, but to that of the living and their agreements.
Context. The Nordic Bronze Age lasted from approximately 1700 to 500 BC. During that period, Scandinavian people left tens of thousands of rock carvings with various common motifs, such as ships, animals, human figures or circles. The category of footprints is rare within this set: they are very careful, carved to life size and with so much detail that they even show the straps of the sandals.
The main site studied is the Mälaren region, which during the Bronze Age was a bay of the Baltic Sea. The uplift of the land after the last ice age has made it possible to chronologically date the engravings: those located at higher altitudes are older.
In detail. In the Mälaren region, 627 carved footprints have been documented in 140 sites, although it is not an isolated phenomenon: they are present throughout the province of Småland and on the Bjäre peninsula. They are deliberately arranged around water sources and shallow depressions where rainwater collected and flowed, as well as near natural crevices and mineral areas.
In addition, there are certain patterns: most sites have a single footprint or an odd number. When there are two, they are almost always different in size and shape, suggesting that they belong to different people. In some cases, the second print was added some time after the first. Fahlander interprets this as an accepted invitation: the first print proposes the link, the second confirms it. If both were recorded at the same time, the commitment was sealed simultaneously by both parties.
Yes, but. The study hypothesis is coherent and well-supported, but it remains a hypothesis. In fact, as Fahlander himself explains, these footprints probably had more than one meaning or purpose. However, there are no written sources from the time that confirm it simply because they do not exist.
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