Helle Vandkilde

Breakthrough of the Nordic Bronze Age: Transcultural Warriorhood and a Carpathian Crossroad in the Sixteenth Century bc

AbstractThe breakthrough of the Nordic Bronze Age (NBA) c. 1600 bc as a koine within Bronze Age Europe can be historically linked to the Carpathian Basin. Nordic distinctiveness entailed an entanglement of cosmology and warriorhood, albeit represented through different media in the hotspot zone (bronze) and in the northern zone (rock). In a Carpathian crossroad between the Eurasian Steppes, the Aegean world and temperate Europe during this time, a transcultural assemblage coalesced, fusing both tangible and intangible innovations from various different places. Superior warriorhood was coupled to beliefs in a tripartite cosmology, including a watery access to the netherworld while also exhibiting new fighting technologies and modes of social conduct. This transculture became creatively translated in a range of hot societies at the onset of the Middle Bronze Age. In southern Scandinavia, weaponry radiated momentous creativity that drew upon Carpathian originals, contacts and a pool of Carpathian ideas, but ...

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.

Hybrid beasts of the Nordic Bronze Age

ABSTRACT 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.

Conflict and War, Archaeology of: Weapons and Artifacts

The archaeology of war is a late ‘discovery’ of the mid-1990s, but since then advances have been made in understanding the scale and roles of warfare in the early history of mankind. Warfare understood as violent encounter with the other probably occurred from the earliest hominids and has accompanied human societies ever since. There is ample evidence of this in terms of skeletal traumata, material culture, weapons, war-related ritual finds, fighting technologies, fortifications, and martial iconographies. New inquiries into these data sets testify that war was often present but rarely grew endemic. Rather the scale of warfare varied with historical circumstances tending to become more comprehensive and even habitual in times of radical social change. Peace was usually part of the picture too. This overall rhythm may suggest that warfare is deeply embedded in a cultural nexus rather than being a question of biology, evolution, or genetics. If not precisely a driver in history, warfare seems nevertheless often situated within the web of causes and effects of social change. The emergence of weaponry made specifically for war is overall contemporaneous with the first institutionalizations of warfare. This is a late phenomenon in the history of mankind dating to between the fifth- and third-millennia BCE from whence the warrior was commemorated in rituals as a figure of glory, beauty, and valor. Besides, genuine weapons and institutions of warfare concur widely with the implementation of more cogent forms of sociopolitical order with stronger leadership and explicit social divisions.