The thesis investigates settlement on the Vikbolandet peninsula in north-eastern Östergötland in the period 200 to 1600. The key question is what happened between 500 and 600, the transition to the Late Iron Age. The extent to which settlement sites and grave fields were moved and settlements were abandoned are some of the issues addressed. The social structure evident from the various types of settlements is another focus.

Information about the sixteenth-century and medieval settlements has been gathered in retrogressive studies of seventeenth-century maps and surveys, with some late medieval charters. One objective has been to identify medieval home farms and manors.

The Late Iron Age is studied using the various types of graves and the grave fields they comprised. Grave fields fall into three groups, which makes it possible to distinguish between different types of settlements. The spatial relationships between them are crucial to the analysis. 

An extensive grave field with several burial mounds, of which some were large (13 metres or more in diameter), is taken to signify a large landowner’s farm. The burial mound is seen as a symbol of odal-right, the embodiment of inheritance and farm ownership. The villages and farms that had grave fields with burial mounds have been categorised as odal-farms. In addition to the 17 identified as large landowners’ farms, the group included many other farms. It is assumed that villages with grave fields but without burial mounds were in many cases farmed by free people in a precursor to medieval tenant system. Several villages have Iron Age-type place names but no Late Iron Age grave fields. It is argued that some may have been farmed by slaves, who were not buried in grave fields.

The spatial relationships between the settlements have also been studied, especially those in the vicinity of the large landowners’ farms. Many of the settlements with no grave fields were close to the large landowners’ farms. On the other neighbouring farms the grave fields were often small and had only a few burial mounds, if any. The impression is that many large landowners’ farms dominated the area and had a dampening effect on burials and especially the construction of burial mounds.

The key question is how many of the Late Iron Age farms and villages can be said to originate in the Middle Iron Age. Settlements with at least 25 Late Iron Age graves and an Early Iron Age grave field that may have continued in use until the sixth century are assumed to have originated in the Middle Iron Age (200-550 A.D.). A large number of villages and farms can be dated to that period, surprisingly often with continuity of settlement or only brief relocation. 

In the Late Iron Age, however, settlement patterns seem gradually to have expanded. In the Roman Iron Age, there had probably been numerous settlements in Vikbolandet. If it had been as densely settled then as it was at the dawn of the Middle Ages, there must have been a significant drop in the number of settlements in the sixth century at the transition to the Late Iron Age.