A Late Neolithic Hoard with Objects of Bronze and Gold from Skeldal, Central Jutland

A Late Neolithic Hoard with Objects of Bronze and Gold from Skeldal, Central Jutlan

A Late Neolithic Hoard from Vigerslev, North Sealand: An Archaeological and Metal Analytical Classification

A Late Neolithic Hoard from Vigerslev, North Sealand - An Archaeological and Metal Analytical Classificatio

Metal Analyses of the Skeldal Hoard and Aspects of Early Danish Metal Use

Metal Analyses of the Skeldal Hoard and Aspects of Early Danish Metal Us

Hybrid beasts of the Nordic Bronze Age

During the Nordic Bronze Age (NBA), hybrid beasts contributed to cosmological and mythical narratives on the main media of metal and rock. These hybrids are composed of body parts from particular animals – including bull, bird, snake, horse and human – which entangle with particular objects or images. On metalwork, they appear especially on bronze razors but also on shields, bowls, combs, helmets and in the shape of figurines. Their main occurrence clusters in the later part of the NBA that is characterised by social change. Especially cremation as the total metamorphosis of the human body aligns with a nexus of analogues firmly linking interspecies composites with ideas of bodily fluidity and transformation. Overall, this may be understood as a way of perceiving, and potentially controlling, the world. NBA hybridising art does not indicate that the religion of the era is reducible to mere animism throughout, but society certainly retained and put to use properties of an animistic tradition. Supported by contextual data, the article proposes that the hybrids related to shared NBA myths and religious practices while also legitimising the privilege and leadership of the upper echelons of NBA societies

A Review of the Early Late Neolithic Period in Denmark: Practice, Identity and Connectivity

The focus of this study is the early part of the Late Neolithic  Period in Denmark with particular emphasis on impact from the European Bell Beaker culture in the fi nal centuries of the third millennium BC. The history of research is briefl y reviewed and the published evidence of domestic and ritual practices and of material expressions are discussed in some detail. The underlying intention is to provide a preliminary conclusion useable as a framework for describing future research potentials and aims. Flint daggers and various other things and materials enriched with symbolic meanings, culture and knowledge were exchanged over northern central Europe and Scandinavia, but were diff erentially received locally. The specifi c cultural and social situation in northern Jutland – associated with a marked concentration of Beaker elements – can best be understood as dependent on a series of internal conditions such as rich sources of high quality fl int as well as on interaction with a wider Late Neolithic realm in southern Scandinavia and with late Bell Beaker and affi liated groups in western Europe.A scenario of competing social identities is presented in which strategies were closely coupled to appropriation of new kinds of material culture and in some measure also new cultural and  social practices. External impulses were continuously translated  into a local cultural language. Future research into Beakers may benefit from an interpretive approach that combines analyses of archaeological data with social theories about the role of  material culture in social practices, identifi cation strategies and cross-cultural connectivity

The Provenance, Use and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age: The state of debate

Bronze is the defining metal of the European Bronze Age and has been at the center of archaeological and science-based research for well over a century. Archaeometallurgical studies have largely focused on determining the geological origin of the constituent metals, copper and tin, and their movement from producer to consumer sites. More recently, the effects of recycling, both temporal and spatial, on the composition of the circulating metal stock have received much attention. Also, discussions of the value and perception of bronze, both as individual objects and as hoarded material, continue to be the focus of scholarly debate. Here, we bring together the sometimes diverging views of several research groups on these topics in an attempt to find common ground and set out the major directions of the debate, for the benefit of future research. The paper discusses in turn issues of: geological provenance of new metal entering the system and how to determine and interpret it; the circulation of extant metal across time and space, and how this is seen in changing compositional signatures; and some economic aspects of metal production. These include the role of metal-producing communities within larger economic settings, quantifying the amount of metal present at any one time within a society, and aspects of hoarding, a distinctive European phenomenon that is less prevalent in the Middle Eastern and Asian Bronze Age societies.Funded by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Researc

Commemorative tales: archaeological responses to modern myth, politics, and war

Academic archaeology of the twentieth century has strangely ignored warfare and violence as relevant aspects of past human activity despite sufficient evidence of war-related traumata, weaponry, warrior burials, and war-celebrative iconographies. Instead - and relatively independently of paradigmatic shifts - two commemorative tales about warriors and peasants in the European societies of the Stone and Bronze Ages have been created. The two archaeological tales are stereotypes positioned at opposite ends of the scale, and they confirm or react against contemporary politics, ideologies, gender hierarchies, and wars. The generally weak presence of war and the final breakthrough of war studies in the mid-1990s can indeed be linked to contemporary politics and war. They are simultaneously entrenched in two myths about the primitive other, which have persuasively influenced European thought at least since the seventeenth century. The emergence of warfare studies in archaeology can be understood as a social response to the many ethnic-based wars of the 1990s. Yet the theme of war is treated in a rational manner, which belies the disaster, suffering, and horror involved in all wars, past or present. This rationalization of prehistoric war begs further consideration: through a comparison with the newest anthropology of war it is discussed how the archaeology of war can avoid becoming celebration of war and thus reproduction of the war mythology of the nation state