 and the last offshoot of the Ernefield culture or the common Ernefield phenomenon in Europe. And I'm going to use a manuscript in order to stick to time, so I beg your forgiveness for that right away. I will first give a short introduction to the Danish Ernefields at large and then move on to some of our results from an in-depth analysis of two of these sites. Results of a project undertaken at the Museums of Southwest Jotland from 2014 until 2017. These sites, the sites of Sir Helen Wilpeck, are found down in this area down here, this very concentration of Ernefield sites in western Denmark. The Danish Ernefields are characterised by cremation graves in turbanese small hillocks and surrounded by circular ditches. These small ditched hillocks are tightly packed in their Ernefields. Sometimes with burials also found in between the hillocks and you see some of these hillocks here with the smaller ditched enclosures around. The majority of cremations are found in an Erne, though other forms of internment do also occur. A few Ernefields are still visible in the Netherlands today as seen here at Mangehoi. But the vast majority of Denmark has been intensively cultivated, so today new sites are mainly discovered as level sites with only burial pits and circular ditches surviving below the topsoil. A situation you can see here on an area photo of the site of Sir Helen excavated in advance of gravel extraction in 1996. The dataset is thus heavily influenced by research, history and preservation. I'm not going to go into detail, but note how many excavations have been going on in the last 40 years. And from that we would think that there would have been a lot of research and publications going on in the phenomenon. But actually from 1969 and until we started the project in 2014, no research publications were done at all in the Ernefield phenomenon. They were merely used for typoconological studies. So at present we have more than 4,000 registered burial monuments in 66 confirmed Ernefields. And these are all dated approximately to 500 to 200 BC. The most Ernefields containing 2200 burials and the two largest containing more than 1,000 each. But turning to the project and our sites at hand, Sir Helen and Wilberg, Sir Helen at the bottom and Wilberg at the top are two middle sized Ernefields respectively containing 103 and 125 graves. Sir Helen is by far the best preserved while Wilberg can contain some of the more exotic grave goods. And that's why we chose those two sites from our area of responsibility. The project was initially undertaken when we discovered that there were no less than 47 Ernes from Sir Helen left unexcavated and still in their castes in the museum storage facility where they had been since 1996. Using this as leverage, we initiated what ended up as an in-depth analysis of the two most informances of these well preserved Ernefields we had in our area at the Museums of Southwest Joplin. First let's turn to the osteological analysis which was done by Lisa Harmer, this is not my work. The bones from the two Ernefields tell a story of initially very conformed ritual cremation and internment. All incinerated at a temperature of approximately 800 degrees Celsius on what must have been a well maintained pyre compared to many other cremations from late Bronze Age and Iron Age cremation is done at a very high temperature which has led to a very good degree of preservation of individual bones. Evening graze with very small amounts of bones which occur quite a lot or touched by the plier, the preservation of bones and countenant are good. There are no sharp edges and solely heat induced fractures that suggest that they have been interred shortly after their cremation. Care has been taken to ensure that no other parts of the pyre are interred with the braided bones and within all the graze we have altogether less than 10 grams of charcoal. So compared to other Danish cremation barnels these cremations undertaken in the Ernefields seems highly ritualized. So as you see here all age categories are present in both Ernefields with ages ranging from neonate children to just a few months old to an adult woman somewhere above 45. A very high proportion of children's graves are found in the Spatia de Vettvik which is very unusually in a Danish prehistoric context but actually in good line with what we see in Sleslisch Holstein and just to the south. There are only half as many women identified in the Ernefields as there are men though if we take into account the traits that have been used for the approximate gender determination men of a prominent physical statue has led to a bias. Thus gender seems to be equally represented in the Boreal Ground. Now no separation in the Ernefields due to gender or age neither. As you will see here where blue percent men, red percent women and green percent children. Rather children's graves are found without a Boreal Monument but closely associated with the large Boreal Monument containing an adult as you can see in this picture in this plan from Sir Hale. Initially in the early fifth century BC the internment is restricted to the Erne Boreals alone but Boreal rituals start to diversify in the late fifth century with Ernebone layers containing just parts of a vessel together with a formative bone and bone layers completely without ceramics but often containing additional adornments from the dress pins and so on. With the 49ers from Sir Hale we had the opportunity to do thorough documentation and micro excavation documentation mainly done by a CT scan. This gave a very consistent picture of the internment. Bones were placed horizontally at the bottom of the Erne and dress pins and other personal adornments were placed on the top of the layer of bones. You can just see the dress pins up here. The interns mostly had a secondary infill. Oh, sorry. I'll take this one just to show. Here's another example of the pins placed on top and to the left you see a pin just down here with a yellow and a small secondary vessel placed bottom up. Bones mostly had a secondary infill of fine sand and humus and then stones on top which looks pretty much like the results of an organic lid that eventually gave in. The placing of personal adornments on top of the bone showed the care that was taken in the internment. A care you can also see in this scan where we see two ring head pins locked together as they were placed on top of the bones within the Erne. Now, turning to the boreal goods, the ritualised and fairly constrained nature of the boreals is also evident. Apart from the Erne, the only goods accompanying the deceased are the occasional secondary vessel as you saw before, dress pins and belt fittings, or few other personal adornments. The only significant difference in distribution between the age groups is that small children do not receive boreal goods at all or one has got a one secondary vessel. On the other hand, the children and juveniles from the ages between 7 and up to 18 are amongst the most well equipped grave we have in these boreal grounds. And just to give you an impression, we cannot really say that there is any difference between the two genders and what they receive in their grave. There has been some discussion to whether Ernes was specifically produced to be boreal containers. In both Sahel and Bik-Bik, the Ernes come in two different variants. Most Ernes are simply reused settlement pots, often shown where at the base and in the interior. But in the early 5th century BC, some Ernes are made as boreal containers specifically. The one Erne you see here from Bik-Bik is such a container. Common to these is a lack of wear on the base of the Ernes. They often have finely smooth surfaces decorated with bands of ornaments with a very limited number of motifs. And finally, on three of these, we find plastic modeling and ornaments showing very stylized faces like Polish and Northern German face-erms and the face-erms that we also see to some extent in late France at the age of Denmark. Here's one Erne X-16 from Bik-Bik, the downturned mouth. An imitated handle with the semblance of long nose. Not that way. Which seems to suggest a close association with the stylized face-erms from the late Bronze Age, well-presented by Jutta Knysen. And the small dots in here bear some resemblance to a beard and stubble. And yes, this is a boreal of an adult male. Two more of the best preserved examples I've seen here. On the list, a very stylized face-erring, again with plastic modeling of the nose. And on the right, you see a normal Erne, only decorated within sized lines. But in this case, the Erne shows where at the base, and close examination shows that the incisions had been made, been done after burning. So in this case, we may be seeing a vessel that is being transformed into an urn by decorating it after years of use in that settlement context. The idea of the Erne as a body of clay for the pre-made broken body of an ancestor also finds support in the size of urns as compared to gender and age. Small urns are only used for small children, and large urns are only used for adult males. This is not due to some form of necessity. Even the largest individuals interred within the sites could easily have been fitted into a small urn. Here are two examples of bones of a dot interred with the medium-sized urns. In my mind, the size of urn is most likely an indirect representation of the body size of the deceased. The same relationship is found in the size of Boyle Monument. He expresses as a diameter of the ringed ditch. Adult individuals are most often found in large monuments. Large children are most often found in small monuments, and small children are not given a monument at all. Finally, men are on average interred in large monuments than women. Thus, the size of both urns and Boyle Monument seems to reflect the size of the individual ancestor interred within. What we see with these face urns and size of urns and Boyle Monument looks like the re-embodiment of the fragmented body within, something that has been discussed in the Central European context as well. In this cyclical making and breaking, we might then expect some breaking of the urns as well. Such a breaking is obvious with the urn bone layers, but the regional activities are more easily documented with well-preserved urn graves. Here is a 76 from Soheil, where one of the handles had been broken off and deposited down here below the urn, together with parts of a rim, as seen here. From Soheil alone, we can document the delivered alteration of five urns in this fashion. On the cycle of making and breaking, we also find evidence of bone retrieval. Here we have bone rusted to these two iron names up here, and that is the only bone that is found in that urn at all. It suggests that it has been that all the other bones had been removed after the beginning of the corrosion of these iron vents. And we can see a lot of these going on with the stones and... Sorry. With the only bone... In addition, nine urn graves from Soheil were without trace of any burnt bone. Three of these had dresses accessories just like X43. Some had oval stones placed at the bottom, and one had a large piece of heat-affected granite placed halfway up urn with two dresspins. Obviously, the importance placed on ancestors also shown the development and layout of urn fields. Just to look at closely spaced boreal monuments of urn fields, we are virtually looking at the landscape of ancestors. Some of the later boreal monuments sometimes squeezed in and sometimes into cutting-former monuments. Most urn fields such as these as Bildbeck and Mankhoi also incorporate ancient burrows into the layout and almost claiming an ancient ancestry line. So, round up. The dating from Bildbeck is not that very good, but if the pattern from Soheil is much clearer, both due to better preservation and supporting dating, here the earliest graves from the late 6th century are found up here. A second group starts to form in the southwest down here in the mid-5th century, and the two groups only gradually merge into the 4th century onwards. So, in Soheil mountain fields, multiple groups of boreals very likely representing ancestors in lines of families, and only in time do they merge into one large boreal community. Just to highlight our conclusions, in many ways the boreal reflects a community rather than the individuals, and highlights a relative, a relative, what you say, the relations between individuals more than the individuals in the boreals. And there is an emphasis on ancestral lines, even trace of retrieval of bones. A retrieval that may indicate a very time-read use of the remnants of ancestors in the world of their living, as was just discussed before. This is still work in progress. We are starting a new project where we will try to analyze the largest of the Danish iron fields with more than 1,400 graves, so please feel free to give suggestions to where to go from here. Thank you.