The Sarup Enclosures I, 1997, 404 p., nbr. ill., rel. -

In this book, the director of the Sarup excavation presents two large enclosures from the neolithic - about 3400 and 3200 BC, at Sarup on the island of Funen in Denmark. Both enclosures were surrounded by palisade fences and a series of large oblong ditches. The Sarup excavation is the largest of its kind in Europe. The enclosures are discussed in the context of a study of the local area which shows that at this date the population had been spread across a number of small settlements and had built more than a hundred megalithic graves (dolmens and passage graves). A comparative survey considers about 800 similar enclosures that have been found in Europe in the last 115 years. The book concludes by interpreting the neolithic enclosures as sites at which a dispersed population temporarily, in an act of rites of passage, buried its dead, later to exhume them and re-inter parts of the bodies in megalithic graves closer to their settlements.