Birds of the Bronze Age: a North European perspective takes in a geographic area including parts of modern Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Baltic Sea islands of Öland and Gotland (Sweden), and Åland (Finland). The volume takes as its chronological period the traditional dates for the Bronze Age in Northern Europe, c. 2350–530 cal BC. The principal aim of the book is to explore the multispecies relational intra-actions between humans and birds in Bronze Age North Europe. A secondary goal is to present a comprehensive picture of the role of birds in Bronze Age society. Goldhahn has a broad vision of what birds may have meant to prehistoric people, and this is expressively described throughout the volume; this wide-ranging approach to birds in general, however, somewhat masks the fact that particular birds were of special importance. One of the key questions explored in this book is whether it is possible to find traces of bird divination in the Bronze Age archaeological record.
Goldhahn is clearly deeply inspired by birds and has benefitted from time spent on Öland—an island that, during the summertime, is densely populated by a variety of breeding birds. Such an environment—both today and in prehistory—has been a great source of inspiration for the observation, investigation and divination of birds. The author's personal love of birds is evident throughout the book, making the text a more engaging read than a succinct analytical investigation of the archaeological data might otherwise be. Modern and Bronze Age worldings are entangled.
The book is divided into three parts and two appendices. The first part is entitled ‘Lift-off’, and presents the aims and theoretical foundations of the study. Part two, ‘Birdscapes’, presents the assemblages from which the data are gathered; these are bird bones and representations of birds on material from settlement and burial contexts. The third part, ‘Intra-actions’, discusses what agential realist perspectivistic interpretations of human-bird intra-actions mean in the context of Bronze Age Northern Europe. The last chapter uses ‘birdlore’ (Northern European traditional folklore), the birdness of birds (intra-actions of specific birds) and archaeological finds to explore how various bird types (wood fowl, waterfowl, swans, common cranes, eagles and ravens) were attributed meaning in the Bronze Age. The two appendices list bird-themed iconography on hanging bowls (appendix I) and rock art panels (appendix II), divided into the themes reflected in the book.
A recurrent theme in the volume is why birds have received so little attention from archaeologists in general, and from Bronze Age archaeologists in particular. Transformations of birds and other creatures (mainly horses) are often depicted, and birds are illustrated on bronze razors, hanging bowls, cremation urns and in rock art from the Bronze Age. How then is it possible that bird bones from Bronze Age contexts continue to be excluded from routine archaeological analyses? Goldhahn considers: “Given the close relationship between boats and birds during the MBA III and LBA that are manifested in bronze objects […] it is a wonder why these bird remains have not yet received the attention of archaeologists” (p. 169). Bronze Age iconography is rich in birds, but birds’ role in religion is still ignored by most researchers. Here lies the book's seminal impact on archaeology. The author carefully details the archaeological material, then combines the data into a bold analytical interpretation, and explains why birds should be taken seriously in the Bronze Age archaeology of Northern Europe. Goldhahn demonstrates that birds were associated with divination; birds transported the souls of the dead to the afterlife, and birds protected against malicious powers and played important roles in transformation magic.
The problems associated with interpreting bird bones found in archaeological contexts are also a central theme of the book. For older excavations, the main challenge is the often poor documentation of contexts. Other challenges are that bird bones are rarely dated by AMS, and that it is often difficult to determine which individuals perished from natural deaths, as opposed to those that were deliberately killed, perhaps for the purpose of divination.
The proximate mechanisms steering bird movements (migrations) are comprised of different cues (celestial, magnetic and the like). For Goldhahn, agential realistic perspectivism is one such driving force. Representations of the merging of human and non-human beings with inanimate objects can be found in Bronze Age iconography. For example, the creatures (and forms) represented in the hanging bowls from Gedesby (Denmark) or Stora Dalby (Sweden) are depicted in such an intense process of transformation and movement that it is impossible to explain what they represent. Goldhahn states that it creates “the feeling that the artists wanted to lure the viewer into questioning a rational categorization of the world” (p. 126). The metamorphosis of different actors and the fluid character of being are powerfully present in Bronze Age artistic expressions.
Birds in the Bronze Age has a clear mission—to give birds a place in the fantastic entanglements between beings in Bronze Age worldings. The horse, the sun and the boat have traditionally had the most important roles in descriptions of Bronze Age religion, despite the many individual bird depictions that also appear, and the fact that in many of the horse illustrations the horses seem to be merged with birds (and snakes?). After reading Birds in the Bronze Age (and as a self-confessed bird-lover), I am convinced that birds did have a central place in Bronze Age world views. I feel the volume will certainly challenge others to explore this potentially meaningful perspective.
