The application concerns funding for the completion of my dissertation, which is based on a medieval material called lily stones and staff cross plates. At present, some text production and editing remains, about six months of work, to complete the thesis for printing and distribution. The chapters covering the introduction and research history, theory and method, and the three analytical chapters are in principle completed. Lily stones and staff cross stones are grave stones, usually in sandstone with images in the form of plant vines, trees of life and staff crosses. The stones can be linked to the oldest medieval stone churches and can be dated to the 12th and 13th centuries. Instead of understanding them from the perspective of art history, as before, I discuss the stone slabs as an archaeological material. Lily stones and stone crosses do not only provide knowledge about the visual world and artistic expression of the Middle Ages. As grave monuments, they also provide knowledge about social conditions, how death and the dead were viewed and related to, and how grave monuments and church sites played an active role in social strategies and the formation of social groups in medieval society. An important question to discuss has therefore been why it became so important for a certain group of people in the 12th and 13th centuries to express their identity through these specific grave monuments.