Introduction: The Bronze Age of Europe (original) (raw)
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Europe at around can best be described as a chessboard of archaeological entities in di erent cultural traditions. ese traditions can easily be categorized into two blocks: on the one hand there are regionally dispersed archaeological cultures and groups, mostly de ned by their respective pottery. ese stretch geographically like a belt from the Balkans in the east, over the Carpathian Basin, to Italy and France, including probably also parts of Spain and Portugal in the west. On the other hand there are the supra-regional, expansionistic cultural phenomena, covering wide parts of the continent and connecting, through their respective social, economic, ideological, and material features, regions and landscapes that were previously culturally separated.
Time, like space, is a physical category. It is a dimension, not an element of reality. It is continuous and totally independent of human will and human actions (Aveni 2001, 13). Many philosophical schools (e.g., Plato, Leibnitz, Husserl) have unveiled the randomness of the world and its dimension – time (Kołakowski 2009, 195). Embedded in culture as the effect of analytical minds, science – including archaeology – aims at taming an accidental physical environment. Humans have a need to give meaning to the world they experience and do so through references to a myth, a reality that requires neither justification nor proof. The essence of culture is that it imposes a mythical organization on the world, providing it with rules of understanding the empirical, random, and meaningless reality as meaningful (Kołakowski 2009, 13-15).
The transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe has often been considered as a supra-regional uniform process, which led to the growing mastery of the new bronze technology. Since the 1920s, archaeologists have divided the Early Bronze Age into two chronological phases (Bronze A1 and A2), which were also seen as stages of technical progress. On the basis of the early radiocarbon dates from the cemetery of Singen, southern Germany, the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe was originally dated around 2300/2200 BC and the transition to more complex casting techniques (i.e., Bronze A2) around 2000 BC. On the basis of 140 newly radiocarbon dated human remains from Final Neolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age cemeteries south of Augsburg (Bavaria) and a re-dating of ten graves from the cemetery of Singen, we propose a significantly different dating range, which forces us to re-think the traditional relative and absolute chronologies as well as the narrative of technical development. We are now able to date the beginning of the Early Bronze Age to around 2150 BC and its end to around 1700 BC. Moreover, there is no transition between Bronze (Bz) A1 and Bronze (Bz) A2, but a complete overlap between the type objects of the two phases from 1900–1700 BC. We thus present a revised chronology of the assumed diagnostic type objects of the Early Bronze Age and recommend a radiocarbon-based view on the development of the material culture. Finally, we propose that the traditional phases Bz A1 and Bz A2 do not represent a chronological sequence, but regionally different social phenomena connected to the willingness of local actors to appropriate the new bronze technology.
Bronze Age research in the late 1980's
Current Swedish Archaeology, 1995
A selective overview of Swedish Bronze Age research during the late 1980s is presented. The dominant topics were settlement archaeology, spatial analysis, bronze metalwork and rock art with local or regional perspectives. Both generalistic and particularistic approaches are notable with the use of quantitative and qualitative methods in a search of comprehensive views for Bronze Age societies.