Urnfields in their own way: The Late Bronze Age on the southern Baltic coast (middle and eastern Pomerania) (original) (raw)

The traditionally perceived vision of the Late Bronze Age in Pomerania (northern Poland) emphasised the affinity of this region to other lands occupied by the Lusatian culture, an entity understood then as a self-conscious macrostructure. There was, for example, an attempt to downplay differences in the forms of material culture, such as bronze items. This had an unambiguous historical and political dimension (e.g. similarities to the Nordic Bronze Age were considered in such categories). More recent studies on socio-economic relations in Pomerania at the turn of the Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age indicate that the differences of the region in relation to the lowland areas of Greater Poland or Silesia went far beyond a greater or lesser affinity between the forms of material culture. Pomeranian communities differed from typical agrarian Lusatian (Urnfield) groups primarily in their more extensive and mobile type of economy and a model of social organisation that was adapted to it. Specific burial rites or ways of manifesting status, visible in hoarding rituals, were just a derivative of these differences. The coastal location of the region played a key role, favouring the maintenance of a network of contacts facing west and north, but not south, as in the case of the interior communities. Moreover, it allowed access to a unique local raw material: amber. The ‘rediscovery’ of this resource in the Late Bronze Age and the resulting supra-regional consequences helped to reinforce the uniqueness of the communities along the Baltic coasts in the Urnfield world.