 This paper is a joint project basically between myself and two other colleagues, Joachim Winterwold and Ruderksen. I'll try to present what we have done last year and we discuss it afterwards. So the aim of this paper, as you can see, is to discuss the sacrificial marches in southern Norway. And I will focus mainly on the latest investigations that we have with the site of Gulmira or Golden Marsh in English. So before I get to discuss what we will do, what is the definition of sacrificial marches? So I refer to it here as to intentionally scattering objects on the edge of the marshlands due to ritual purposes. So what is mutual between all these marches that we find in southern Norway? The sacrificial marches are tomography quite similar and often in the form of concave recesses in the landscape. And the landscape that I refer to, it's not 1,000 meters or 2,000 meters. We are talking about more or less 160, 170 meters of sea level. The recesses are sheltered from the outside by elevation in the landscape, usually in all directions. Centrally located on the sacrificial sites are marshes or small bodies of water enclosed by marshes. The places are perceived as closed, hidden and shielded from the outside world. Common to the majority of the locations are single tiposet objects on the edge of small marshes. So the region that I'm talking about is, as you can see here, in the southern edge of Norway. It will be one county in the first of January 2020. And we instead of calling it the best actor, so it will be the actor region. That's why I'm talking about actor now. In the coastal health of Agder there are a number of sacrificial sites in conjunction with the biographically defined marshlands. The sites are scattered across a belt of the house 7 to 10 kilometers inland from the Agder coast and situated at the height of 160 to 180 meters above sea level. Comparing the data gathered from the finds, the sacrificial objects so far found appear to have a chronological center in the Neolithic and Bronze Age between 3800 and 500 BC. Finds without context. Well, let us see what we are talking about. The objects found are usually not a result of archaeological investigations, but found due to landowners work with the cultivations of the area, or drainage of marsh. Much of the data gathered thus comes from randomly submitted findings. In 2018, the West Agder County Council had the opportunity to investigate one of these sacrificial sites. And I just have to clarify this issue. In Norway we have a system that the County Councils, we have the authority to investigate, to register the sites, to do the surveys and to protect them, but we are not allowed to excavate them. When we decide that it will be excavated, then it's another institution which is the cultural history of the University of Oslo, who has the responsibility to come and excavate the site. That's why all what I'm talking about is the results of surveys, not excavations. This presentation will focus on the results from the archaeological investigation of Grimera or the Odin Marsh at the Haagland in the municipality of Mandar. Before I start talking about our sites, I just want to see some of the objects that we found in the nearby marshes in the vicinity of our site. So the first one, this one is from, is a sickle from Lindesnes, which is nearby county. And this one is dagger from the same county. This chisel is from the same county, whereas this sort of copper is from Lindesnes. The distance that we are talking about is more or less around 10 kilometers, not more than that. Why actually we start walking with this project? Thanks to the Department of Transport or the new sister company that we call New Roads in Norway, we had a project where we will investigate the new motorway that we will build between Kristiansand and all the way to Stavanger in the west. This part that we will investigate is around 107 kilometers and the width of this motorway is somewhere from 200 to 500 meters. So we are talking about enormous area that we have to excavate or actually investigate. So all the lines that you see it's done. Now this year we are walking with this part and next year we will continue. So the Hagenland area that we will talk about is few kilometers to the north of the city center of Mandel. And this is how it looks like. So what is special about this area, now I will tell you. The landowner of this house built a new house in the 30s. When he built this house he found some nice objects on the edge of this marsh because all this area was actually marshland. He did drainage and he penetrated the entire area by building this road. So all what we see up to today after almost 80-90 years that all this area is still very wetty that I will not go. Voligieria to be honest with you. This area is a little bit better but again still wetty. Another object which was found was here. Then we have a grave mound here. We have another grave mound there. And all these red spots are automatically protected grave mounds that we found recently. I will talk about them afterwards. So these are the objects that were found in the 30s as you can see. According to typology they are dated back to the Mesolithic of Norway around 6,350 to 3,800 calibrated years before present. Here we can see the location of the grave mounds. So this is actually the marsh area that we are talking about. And here we have removed a grave mound. When they built this house they removed this grave mound. The same is here with the stone that I was talking about. The second one is here. Removed grave mound here whereas these are still there. This part is usually we found more cooking bits and activities dated back to the Iron Age. So this one is a little bit modern in comparison to what we are talking about. But it was quite interesting because we found it on the edge of the marshes. All these points that you see here like stars are objects that we found during the latest investigations. And this spot if you remember I will talk about later it's the pollen sample that we took. As I told you we do not excavate. We are not allowed to excavate but we are allowed to do some surveys. And we use bulldozers in Norway to remove the topsoil in order to see the layers beneath the topsoil. Otherwise we will never finish what we are doing. So that's why here you can see the remains of the small investigations that we have done in the entire area. Some of the mounds as you can see one of them is here, one of them is there. And we are looking toward the marshes in this particular area. So they are always positioned at a higher elevation and overlooking at the marshes from all directions. So this is the area that we are talking about. We have another grave mound here, believe it or not. And we have a third one or a fifth one actually that was removed here. Some of the cooking bits that we found as you can see here in the excavation. And we wanted to try to investigate a little bit of these grave mounds to see what kind of material they were built of. Because either they are accumulation of stones or accumulation of soil. So we did open this area just to see what kind of grave mounds we have. And when we started excavating this area which was quite okay to the driver of the bulldozer to use his machine here. Otherwise he couldn't come here. We found some objects which were most likely thrown from the top. These are some of the objects that we found. And the name of the area is Gul Mira which indicates that someone has found a golden object in that area. But we don't know anything about it. And usually in Norway they are very, they like to use the name. So the name has a tradition, has history. Why they are using it? Because someone definitely has found a golden object. In order to clarify the issue we wanted to know what kind of activities we have in the area. So we took a pollen sample. The depth of this pollen sample was a curve of 520 centimeters. And the results were quite interesting. So the latest results from the pollen analysis indicate that agrarian activities did not occur before 800 A.D. So we are talking about the beginning of the Viking Age in Norway. So all the other areas, more than four meters of accumulation of pollen, it's natural pollen. Which indicates that no one has used or exploited this area for agrarian purposes or for agrarian purposes. Why on earth they will come and position all their grape mounds in that area? Why they put their objects in the soil there? So here are the results of the pollen analysis. I have not so much time so I'll try to go a little bit faster to my conclusion. So the ritual activities in southern Norway were positioned nearby marshes throughout millennia. Some of these marshes are located along the coast whereas many others are scattered across the belt in the uplands. Why people did use the marshes as ritual sites? Ancient people had respect to marshes, the unknown world. The marshes are dangerous and no one can cross them. Well yes, they are taboo territories. Yes, you can't use boat, you can't swim, and you can't go. So basically we are stuck. In this regard the marshes could function as ritual territories where the ancient people could communicate with their gods without any disturbance. If someone has thrown an object in the marshes no one would dare to touch it or remove it. So it will remain there until a lot of the archaeologists come and pick it up. So my recommendations are archaeological activities in southern Norway did not give enough attention to marshes areas, usually due to time consuming and inefficiency in conducting surveys and excavations. Dangerous, we don't have enough time, it costs a lot of money, etc. Based on our new experience we do recommend our colleagues to be more concerned when it comes to marshes and provide the necessary skills and expertise to fulfill such activities. Particularly when we have a large project and we have enough money to conduct such kind of activities. The edges of the marshes are usually accessible and are safe to use a bulldozer to remove the topsoil before conducting a survey. Here we go.