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Life and afterlife in the Nordic Bronze Age contains some of the papers presented at the 15th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium, organized by Lund University on 11-15 June 2019. Over these five days approximately 100 researchers of the Bronze Age gathered to present papers and discuss traditional research questions as well as current topics that have bee[Bokinfo].
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.
This book explores and critiques the underlying assumption that a binary gender system and patriarchal norms were universal in Bronze Age Europe through a careful analysis of burial practice in Ireland and Scotland. Gender and Society on the Margins of Bronze Age Europe makes a decisive and critical intervention in the debate around the nature of gender in the European Bronze Age. Tacking between scales, from the detail of local practice to a major analysis of recently excavated and analysed skeletons, it argues that binary gender was far from universal in Bronze Age Europe, and consequently questions its broader importance. Unlike bronze technology, shared widely between communities across Europe, binary gender was an optional or negotiable part of Bronze Age life. The book goes on to assess the huge implications of this evidence firstly, for the history of gender, as it indicates that there was no simple linear trajectory to binary gender and patriarchy and secondly, by demonstrating that interconnectivity in Bronze Age Europe did not result in fundamental social and ideological agreement, undermining the idea of a shared Bronze Age society. At its core, the book reimagines how gender archaeology can be conducted, inspired by the sub-discipline’s radical origins and following a method rooted in the detail of local practice. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of the European Bronze Age, gender (pre)history, and gender archaeology. It connects with major themes in theoretical thinking across the humanities, particularly relating to posthumanism, assemblage theory, embodiment and gender.
This Element volume focuses on how archaeologists construct narratives of past people and environments from the complex and fragmented archaeological record. In keeping with its position in a series of historiography, it considers how we make meaning from things and places, with an emphasis on changing practices over time and the questions archaeologists have and can ask of the archaeological record. It aims to provide readers with a reflexive and comprehensive overview of what it is that archaeologists do with the archaeological record, how that translates into specific stories or narratives about the past, and the limitations or advantages of these when trying to understand past worlds. The goal is to shift the reader's perspective of archaeology away from seeing it as a primarily data gathering field, to a clearer understanding of how archaeologists make and use the data they uncover.
This volume presents a comprehensive overview of gender archaeology, both theory and practice, and contributes a substantial and definitive reference work by bringing together state-of-the-art research, theoretical overviews, and the latest debates in the field. Responding to the shifts in the theoretical landscape and the societal and political frameworks within which we produce our knowledge, chapters create both a solid theoretical baseline which help readers grasp the significance of gender in archaeology as well as offer perspectives on how to engender produced knowledge about the past. In line with recent focus on the shortcomings of gender and archaeological representation, chapters also detangle academic discourse and popular representations in order to present novel ways of successfully negotiating the pitfalls of gendered ideas about past behaviours. By encouraging novel ways of integrating theoretical perspectives with scrutiny of gender stereotypes, original empirical examinations of identity markers and behaviours, and re-examinations of static representations of identities through new lenses, such as intersectional perspectives, personhood, and materiality debates, the volume is theoretically rich and will simultaneously provide a necessary benchmark for future archaeological discourses. Finally, it will incorporate perspectives from researchers with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints to provide a truly comprehensive overview. It will not shy away from engaging with politically contentious issues surrounding knowledge production but will include perspectives from researchers whose focus is less on feminist critiques and more on gender and identities. Thus, the volume bridges the two most prominent directions currently discernible within the focus area, namely, feminist re-examinations on the one hand and research focused more on bodily practice and gendered experiences on the other. The Routledge Handbook of Gender Archaeology is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in gender archaeology as well as gender studies more widely.
Creativity is an integral part of human history, yet most studies focus on the modern era, leaving unresolved questions about the formative role that creativity has played in the past. This book explores the fundamental nature of creativity in the European Bronze Age. Considering developments in crafts that we take for granted today, such as pottery, textiles, and metalwork, the volume compares and contrasts various aspects of their development, from the construction of the materials themselves, through the production processes, to the design and effects deployed in finished objects. It explores how creativity is closely related to changes in material culture, how it directs responses to the new and unfamiliar, and how it has resulted in changes to familiar things and practices. Written by an international team of scholars, the case studies in this volume consider wider issues and provide detailed insights into creative solutions found in specific objects.
Broken Bodies, Places and Objects demonstrates the breadth of fragmentation and fragment use in prehistory and history and provides an up-to-date insight into current archaeological thinking around the topic. A seal broken and shared by two trade parties, dog jaws accompanying the dead in Mesolithic burials, fragments of ancient warships commodified as souvenirs, parts of an ancient dynastic throne split up between different colonial collections... Pieces of the past are everywhere around us. Fragments have a special potential precisely because of their incomplete format – as a new matter that can reference its original whole but can also live on with new, unrelated meanings. Deliberate breakage of bodies, places and objects for the use of fragments has been attested from all time periods in the past. It has now been over 20 years since John Chapman’s major publication introducing fragmentation studies, and the topic is more present than ever in archaeology. This volume offers the first European-wide review of the concept of fragmentation, collecting case studies from the Neolithic to Modernity and extending the ideas of fragmentation theory in new directions. The book is written for scholars and students in archaeology, but it is also relevant for neighbouring fields with an interest in material culture, such as anthropology, history, cultural heritage studies, museology, art and architecture.
This collection of articles helps to explain why the Bronze Age has come to hold such a fascination within modern archaeological research. By providing new theoretical and analytical perspectives on the evidence new interpretative avenues have opened, it situates the history of the Bronze Age in both a local and a global setting.
This book collects recent works on the subjects of sacrificial offerings, ritualized violence and the relative values thereof in the contexts of Scandinavian prehistory from the Neolithic to the Viking era. The volume builds on a workshop hosted at the National Museum of Denmark in 2018 which inaugurated the beginning of the research project ‘Human Sacrifice and Value: The limits of sacred violence’ and was supported by the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The volume brings together research and perspectives that attempt to go beyond the who, what and where of most archaeological and anthropological investigations of sacrificial violence to address both the underlying and explicit forms of value associated with such events. The volume re-opens investigations into notions of value relating to diverse evidence and suggested evidence for human sacrifice and related ritualized violence. It covers a broad spectrum of issues relating to novel interpretations of the existing archaeological materials, but with a focus on the study of value and value dynamics in these diverse ritual contexts, engaging in questions of identity, cosmology, economics and social relations. Cases span from the Scandinavian Late Neolithic and Nordic Bronze Age, through to the well-known wetland deposits and bog bodies of the Iron Age, to Viking era executions, ‘deviant’ burials and contemporaneous double/multiple graves, exploring the implications for the transformation of sacrificial practices across Scandinavian prehistory. Each contribution attempts to untangle the myriad forms of value at play in different incarnations of human offerings, and provide insights into how those values were expressed, e.g., in the selection and treatment of victims in relation to their status, personhood, identity and life-history.
"The Handbook of Religions in Ancient Europe" surveys the major religious currents of Europe before Christianity - the first continental religion with hegemonic ambition - wiped out most local religions. The evidence - whether archaeological or written - is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the variety of religions documented by the sources and the range of languages used are bewildering. The "Handbook" brings together leading authorities on pre-Christian religious history to provide a state-of-the-art survey. The first section of the book covers the Prehistoric period, from the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age. The second section covers the period since writing systems began. Ranging across the Mediterranean and Northern, Celtic and Slavic Europe, the essays assess the archaeological and textual evidence. Dispersed archaeological remains and biased outside sources constitute our main sources of information, so the complex task of interpreting these traces is explained for each case. The "Handbook" also aims to highlight the plurality of religion in ancient Europe: the many ways in which it is expressed, notably in discourse, action, organization, and material culture; how it is produced and maintained by different people with different interests; how communities always connect with or disassociate from adjunct communities and how their beliefs and rituals are shaped by these relationships. The "Handbook" will be invaluable to anyone interested in ancient History and also to scholars and students of Religion, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Classical Studies.