Based
on your visit today to Lejre, summarize the impact that the Danish landscape
has and on the Danish as a people, and vice versa.
While on the grounds of Land of
Legends in Lejre, our class was able to temporarily travel back in time and
experience what life could’ve been like in years past. By looking at the
residences and workplaces of the Danes of the past that were found through
archeology, viewers today are able to understand different ways of life that
the Danes had to endure. From the years of the Ice Age approximately 16,000
years ago, up until more recent years the Danes have evolved their ways of
life. During the Ice Age, the primary way of life was to use a hunter-gatherer
method of hunting, for means to survive and during the Ice Age, the land was
covered by up to a kilometer of ice therefore not many animals could live and
survive there.
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| Land of Legends shows the untouched land of Denmark and all of its natural features. |
As the temperatures began to rise, and
the ice started to melt, the water form the glaciers cut through the land and
created valleys. Also, reindeer started to make their way to Denmark and travelled
in these valleys, making them fairly easy targets to be hunted. While the
temperatures continued to rise, and the reindeer continued to move north, a new
animal became the focus of the hunters, the auroch. The auroch was much larger
and therefore much harder to hunt, but the Danes adapted their strategies
accordingly. As the Danes hunted the auroch more and more, they eventually went
extinct and the Danes had to change their way of life. An important fact about
this time period was the use of bogs. A bog is an area where the Danes would
place all of the animal carcasses after they used all of the parts of the
animals they could, to dispose of the waste in order to keep other predators away.
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| This bog shows the skulls of hunted animals as well as the skin, hanging in the background. |
Because of this among other
climatic factors, the Danes began to form settlements and live a more
agricultural-based life, as farmers. To do this, the Danes had to burn down forests
to make room for their farms and they started building houses made from the
resources they had around them which include animal skin, wood, clay and straw,
depending on the time period. By destroying forests and building houses, the
land in Denmark began to change just a bit. Denmark as a whole went from an
area of almost 100% forest to a much lower figure. Currently, Denmark consists
of just 13% forest, which can be attributed to industrialization and
urbanization. Although a large part of the forests were destroyed in more
recent years, this destruction did begin thousands of years ago. The landscape
of Denmark and the Danes themselves each impacted one another during these
transitional periods, and that trend continues today. In a constantly changing
modern-day Denmark, the Land of Legends tour allows its customers to step back
and see the small portion of Danish land that has not been changed in recent
years and experience the past in today’s time.
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| This is what archeologist assume small communities looked like in the Iron Age. |
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