Archaeologia Baltica

Apart from being a status marker with strong ritual connotations it is suggested that the horse in prehistory is a liminal agent between sea and land. As gender he represents land. The ship is as female as the sea. But the gender is contextual and culture specific. The connections of the horse with the ship are attributed to the opposition between the two elements. Since this opposition belongs to maritime cultures in the North the structural “cosmology” in question may have filtered over also to inland agrarian conditions. Symbols are polysemic and may even have represented different things to different social classes, like in recent times.