Alby, Öland

• 1. Introduction

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  Farming in Alby ended in 2006, concluding roughly six thousand years of continuous cultivation on one narrow coastal strip. Alby is a village on Öland, Sweden's second largest island, in the Baltic Sea. It sits between open water on the east and the Stora Alvaret limestone plain on the west. The settlement's origins reach back to around 6000-7000 BC. That was when the first arrivals crossed the Kalmar Strait from the Swedish mainland, traveling across ice. Who were these people, and what did they leave behind? What held a community to this particular sliver of land for nearly nine thousand years?

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• 2. The Limestone Foundation

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  Bedrock under Alby is primarily Ordovician limestone, dating to at least 600 million years ago. Glaciers ground this stone into the nearly flat, thin-soiled terrain now called the alvar. Most of the Stora Alvaret carries topsoil no deeper than two centimeters. That minimal layer sustains grasses and wildflowers but cannot support building foundations, crop fields, or burial grounds.

  The ridge was formed by wave action during the post-Ice Age uplift that raised the island of Öland itself from the sea. It is the only place along Öland's eastern shore where the earth exceeds the alvar's two-centimeter ceiling. On it lie all of Alby's building foundations, agricultural fields, and burial grounds. Three kilometers south lies the Hulterstad district, where the same ridge has supported continuous occupation since at least the Bronze Age. The earliest of those settlers predated the Bronze Age by several thousand years.

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• 3. The Alby People

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  Excavations conducted over several years in the latter 20th century revealed what the village looked like before farming began. The early Stone Age inhabitants built wooden huts at the edge of a prehistoric lagoon, which lay to the northwest of the present village. Among the artifacts recovered from these digs were bone spears, moose antler harpoons, and worked flint. The animal remains found alongside them included bear, marten, seal, and porpoise.

  These first inhabitants are referred to in the archaeological literature as the Alby People. Their settlement is counted among the key resources that helped establish the scientific case for the Stora Alvaret's UNESCO World Heritage designation. By around 4000 BC, farming had supplanted hunting and gathering as the primary livelihood on this ridge. In the centuries that followed, communities here would leave a very different kind of mark on the landscape.

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• 4. The Hulterstad Gravefield

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  The Hulterstad Gravfeld contains more than 170 individual burials, making it one of the largest gravefields on the island of Öland. It lies to the east of the coast highway, just south of Alby, and its burials span the late Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the Viking era. The undulating terrain of the gravefield is characteristic of Iron Age barrow construction, and numerous standing stones are present throughout.

  Artifacts recovered from the Hulterstad Gravfeld include bronze chains and a bone needle case. Viking graves have also been found here and at the Strandvalle Gravfeld, a few kilometers further south. Together, these sites suggest that Alby was one link in a chain of Viking settlements concentrated along the southeastern coast of Öland. Seafaring cultures appear to have favored this eastern shore, probably because of its good beaches and availability of forested land.

  Viking interments at Hulterstad are dated to the High Middle Ages. The centuries that followed would be recorded not in grave goods but in timber, stone, and written records.

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• 5. Malmhouses and Walls

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  The oldest surviving buildings in Alby date to the 16th century. They are Malmhouses, built to shelter the poor and the landless. Constructed with heavy timber framing and interior fireplaces, they met a standard of quality unusual for housing of that kind. Funded by the propertied residents of Alby for their landless neighbors, these homes stand as an early record of the community's social values.

  By royal decree, detailed church records began to be kept in the latter 17th century, covering births, deaths, baptisms, and annual household censuses for the Hulterstad district. The Hulterstad Church maintained these archives and kept Alby's records separate from those of neighboring villages. Those documents allow historians to estimate that Alby's late 17th century population numbered between 35 and 60 individuals. Life expectancy at that time was approximately 45 years.

  The village blacksmith's shop was built, probably in the 18th century, on the west side of the coast highway. It had to stand outside the 17th century drystone town wall, as the forge posed too great a fire risk to the buildings inside. As of 2006, the structure still stands, converted to a small museum. In those same decades, Alby was losing some of its residents not to neighboring villages but to the New World.

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• 6. The Emigrant Tide

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  From the latter 1600s through the 1800s, Alby's population continued to expand. The village diversified beyond farming, developing specialists including a tailor. Farming remained the dominant livelihood, but the community had grown complex enough to support people whose work was not agriculture.

  Ship passage records from this period list many Alby residents crossing to the United States of America. Copies of those records, along with the Hulterstad Church archives, are held at the Swedish Emigrant Institute in Växjö. That pairing of departure records and parish accounts describes a village at a turning point. To the west, the Stora Alvaret was beginning to attract scientists who recognized that this barren plateau harbored plant life found nowhere else.

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• 7. Linnaeus and the Living Limestone

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  In 1741, Carl Linnaeus visited the eastern portion of the Stora Alvaret, conducting what became the first documented scientific study of its plant life. Linnaeus wrote: "It is noteworthy how some plants are able to thrive on the driest and most barren places of the alvar." The Stora Alvaret, which borders Alby on the west, is the greatest expanse of alvar habitat in Europe.

  The Stora Alvaret's soil mantle is extremely thin, creating conditions that favor unusual adaptation. Among the plants found on this limestone pavement are stonecrop, dropwort, and kidney vetch. Artemisia Öelandica, endemic to Öland, grows nowhere else. Some species here are relicts of the glacial age, surviving in conditions that no longer exist elsewhere nearby. The alvar also supports rare species of butterflies, moths, and other insects.

  At the northwest of Alby lie seasonal vernal pools that support a diversity of wetland plants. The eastern edge of the village gives way to a coastal plain of sand and shingle beaches. Native grasses and beach wildflowers grow there, in conditions quite different from those on the alvar. The black tern and the Eurasian curlew frequent both the beach side and the vernal ponds.

  Great cormorants and mute swans are among the marine birds found along this stretch of coast. Harbour seals and harbour porpoises appear in the Baltic waters offshore. The Stora Alvaret's extraordinary biodiversity and prehistoric heritage earned it a UNESCO World Heritage designation, with Alby named as a component. As of 2006, roughly 125 people live in the village, with virtually no commercial land use aside from a bookstore-cafe and a small museum. The closest sizable city, Färjestaden, lies 25 kilometers to the northwest at the Öland Bridge landing. Thirty kilometers south, at Öland's southern tip, the former royal game reserve at Ottenby is now a nature reserve. It marks the southern end of the same island where Linnaeus conducted the first scientific study of the Stora Alvaret's biota, in 1741.

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