The Vitlycke panel

Over the weekend, Pia came to see us. The weather was a bit unstable, but we were lucky to have clear skies for the excursion I had in mind for our Saturday - to the Vitlycke Museum.
We came just in time to join the guided session of the Vitlycke panel, which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Area. It features 500 individual images, everything from shamans and warriors to sun symbols and mysterious ships.

This panel is 20 meters long, and nearly 100 of the images are ships, with the longest being over 3 m! These images were created over a long period spanning across the Bronze and Iron ages, from 1700 BCE to 300 BCE.
They depict stories of life, death, fertility and other things important in people's lives, then as now.

We got a half an hour presentation of the petroglyphs, where each carving tells a story. Ha ha, don't you just love this man running away from... a snake? A monster? Arms in the air, you can almost hear him scream as he runs!

After the presentation we continued to explore up in the woods behind the panel, where there was a kilometer long boardwalk around some more panels and burial cairns from the Early Bronze Age.

This rock carving is the most widespread rock carving of Sweden. These boats here are depicted on the Swedish 50-krona bill, see below: