SOCIETY AND ECOLOGY DURING THE MIDDLE BRONZE AGE OF SOUTHERN SCANDINAVIA (original) (raw)
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The Bronze Age was first acknowledged as a separate period, and thus as an object of study, in 1836 when Christian Jürgensen Thomsen published his famous three-agesystem. The Bronze Age was here sandwiched in between the Stone Age and the Iron Age. The latter periods built on indigenous materials of stone and iron. The Bronze Age, by contrast, was founded on an artificial, and thus truly innovative, alloy of copper and tin, which were traded into metal-poor Scandinavia from metal-rich regions of central Europe. Thomsen's system was virtually Darwinian in its evolutionary logic and became the foundation of all later research, which has progressed mostly in leaps.
Outlining the Study of Nordic Bronze Ages: Moving from singularity to diversity
In: Life and afterlife in the Nordic Bronze Age (eds Tornberg, A., Svensson, A. & Apel, J), pp. 11-26. , 2022
Research dealing with the Scandinavian Bronze Age period has often been related to the notion of a society organized around metal trade, both in terms of social organization and networks. The central area for this development has been located to the southernmost parts of Scandinavia. However, the rich southern material in the form of a combination of metals, monumental mounds and longhouses is not relatable to most other parts of the Nordic area. In this paper we outline a study of several co-existing Bronze Ages, with the purpose of understanding the distribution and chronology of the vast and varied archaeological record of the Nordic area without any reference to a central area in the south. We argue for the possibility of studying Bronze Age movements, contacts, networks, and social organization directly based on the archaeological material at hand, rather than in relation to the norm set by the southern Bronze Age paradigm. This enables possibilities of studying intersections of archaeological material that change in relation to both time and space.
The Archaeology of Northern Europe (TANE 1), 2020
This innovative volume draws on a range of materials and places to explore the disparate facets of Bronze Age society across the Nordic region through the key themes of time and trajectory, rituals and everyday life, and encounters and identities. The Bronze Age in Northern Europe was a place of diversity and contrast, an era that saw movements and changes not just of peoples, but of cultures, beliefs, and socio-political systems, and that led to the forging of ontological ideas materialized in landscapes, bodies, and technologies. Drawing on a range of materials and places, the innovative contributions gathered here in this volume explore the disparate facets of Bronze Age society across the Nordic region through the key themes of time and trajectory, rituals and everyday life, and encounters and identities. The contributions explore how and why society evolved over time, from the changing nature of sea travel to new technologies in house building, and from advances in lithic production to evolving burial practices and beliefs in the afterlife. This edited collection honours the ground-breaking research of Professor Christopher Prescott, an outstanding figure in the study of the Bronze Age north, and it takes as its inspiration the diversity, interdisciplinarity, and vitality of his own research in order to make a major new contribution to the field, and to shed new light on a Bronze Age full of contrasts and connections.
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2023
In this paper, we investigate the Scandinavian Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of Kinnekulle in southwestern Sweden. The above-mentioned periods in the study area are poorly understood and the archaeological record consists of a few stray finds and a concentration of 20 gallery graves. This study focuses on three of the gallery graves where commingled skeletons from successive burials were recovered. The human remains and the artefacts from the graves were used for discussing individual life stories as well as living societies with the aim of gaining new knowledge of the last part of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in southwestern Sweden. We focused on questions concerning health and trauma, mobility and exchange networks, and diet and subsistence of the people using the graves. Chronological, bioarchaeological, and biomolecular aspects of the burials were approached through the application of archaeological and osteological studies, as well as stable isotope, strontium isotope, radiocarbon, and mtDNA analyses. The study provides evidence for high mobility and diverse diets, as well as inhumations primarily dated to the transition between the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. We suggest that the mountain plateau of Kinnekulle was mainly reserved for the dead, while the people lived in agriculture-based groups in the surrounding lower lying regions.
2015
Bronze Age settlements and burials in the Swedish provinces around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren yield few bronze objects and fewer of the era's fine stone battle axes. Instead, these things were found by people working on wetland reclamation and stream dredging for about a century up to the Second World War. Then the finds stopped because of changed agricultural practices. The objects themselves have received much study. Not so with the sites where they were deposited. This book reports on a wide-ranging landscape-archaeological survey of Bronze Age deposition sites, with the aim to seek general rules in the placement of sites. How did a person choose the appropriate site to deposit a socketed axe in 800 BC? The author has investigated known sites on foot and from his desk, using a wide range of archive materials, maps and shoreline displacement data that have only recently come on-line. Over 140 sites are identified closely enough to allow characterisation of their Bronze Age landscape contexts. Numerous recurring traits emerge, forming a basic predictive or heuristic model. Bronze Age deposition sites, the author argues, are a site category that could profitably be placed on contract archaeology's agenda during infrastructure projects. Archaeologists should seek these sites, not wait for others to report on finding them.
Life and afterlife in the Nordic Bronze Age. Proceedings of the 15th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium held in Lund, Sweden, June 11-15, 2019. Edited by A. Tornberg, A. Svensson, J. Apel. Acta Archaeologica Lundensia. Series prima in 4° No 37, 119-139, 2022
The study of burials is central to archaeology in many ways. Each burial is likely to have been an event that individuals and/or groups of various sizes attended, following norms, rituals, and customs; possibly from time to time such norms were altered or new ones were introduced. One may consider that during the funerary rituals, the deceased becomes tightly enmeshed with his or her burial. In this process, the complex plurality of each burial with all its components ends up conveying messages to the world of the living. Burial contexts can be considered for instance as communicating adherence or contrast to dominating values and norms; they could also signal forms of social, cultural, political or economic status characterizing the deceased him-/herself or perhaps his or her kin. This contribution aims to discuss and problematize the complexity at display in Late Bronze Age burials from southern Scandinavia using the cemetery at Simris II, in southeastern Sweden, as a case study. The dominant burial practice during the period in question is cremation, which almost completely obliterates the body of the deceased and its identity markers (e.g., gender, age, individual features, and material culture such as clothing and adornments). A review of the archaeological record—combined with data from recent multidisciplinary studies of the ceramic and osteological material from the site—suggests that not only the carefully selected urns, but also the characteristics and the positions of the graves embodied manifold meanings. Taken together, they likely signalled significant aspects of the identity of the deceased or of the family/group to which they belonged.
Forging Identities. The Mobility of Culture in Bronze Age Europe: Volume 1. BAR S2771.
Over the last two decades several large-scale developer-funded archaeological investigations in the Malmö area have resulted in a deeper knowledge of the variation in how people formed their surroundings, especially in terms of the ways in which they created and manifested social and economic status and the existence of external contacts during the Late Neolithic and earliest Bronze Age. As a whole, settlement structure was varied containing examples of both single farms and villages. Burial traditions differed on the local level, suggesting that choices were made by individual families or that clans actively formed these traditions as part of a social strategy. For example, a high-status cemetery close to the shore has been interpreted as important in terms of the manifestation of over-sea contacts.