The Bronze Age of Sweden began about 1500 B.C., and lasted for a thousand years, or until the beginning of the fifth century before Christ. The period has been divided into an Earlier and a Later Bronze Age, a division which has been questioned as to its absolute correctness. The works from the former are decorated with fine spiral ornaments and zigzag lines. The graves generally contain remains of unburned bodies. The antiquities of the Earlier Bronze Age, almost without an exception, appear to be of native workmanship. They are distinguished by artistic forms and point to a highly developed taste in the working of bronze. They generally surpass in this respect the relics of the Bronze Age found in almost all other European countries. The works belonging to the Later Bronze Age are characterized by a very different taste and style of ornamentation, though even they are often the result of great skill. The spiral ornaments are no longer predominant, but the ends of rings, knife-handles, and the like, are often rolled up in spiral volutes.
During this period the dead were always burned. Buttons, sword-hilts, and other works of bronze were sometimes decorated with pieces of amber and resin inlaid. Objects are also often found overlaid with thin plates of gold.
Remarkable are the rock-carvings from this period. The Swedes of the Bronze Age understood, by a kind of picture-writing, how to preserve the memory of important events, although an alphabet of any kind was unknown. The rock-carvings have been found abundantly in Bohuslæn (formerly a part of West Gothland) and East Gothland, but also occur in Scania and other parts of Sweden. At the time of the arrival of Cortez in Mexico the Aztecs were exactly on the same standpoint. In spite of their high civilization, they were in the Bronze Age and possessed a picture-writing, but were not acquainted with an alphabet. In Sweden, as in Mexico, there certainly once existed an oral tradition necessary for its interpretation, which, now lost, leaves little hope for their present or future explanation. Yet they throw considerable light on Swedish civilization during this remote period. Thus they show that horses were already used for riding and driving. Cattle are represented. In pairs these are harnessed to a plow, which is being driven by a man. Boats are depicted, generally very large ones, without masts, but with thirty pairs of oars or more. They are usually unlike at the two ends, sometimes adorned with an animal’s head in the high and narrow stem, sometimes with a similar decoration also in the stern.