This publication synthesizes the achievements of a nine-year research project (1998–2006), which focused on three specific study areas centred on southern Scandinavia (Thy, Denmark, and Tanum, Sweden), the Benta Valley in Hungary and Monte Polizzo, in Sicily. A wide range of multidisciplinary skills and diverse sources of funding were brought together through the collaboration of eight universities, many local museums and several national heritage organizations.
The research was inspired and driven forward by professors Tim Earle (Northwestern University, USA) and Kristian Kristiansen (Gothenburg University), whose integration of undergraduate and postgraduate studies within the overall strategy allowed development of a wide range of specialist research papers, results from which have been incorporated into this volume (full details are usefully listed in the appendices).
The main contributors to the volume include Charles French (Cambridge University), who presents the palaeoenvironmental background and identifies a massive episode of forest clearance around 2700 bc; Michael Kolb (Northern Illinois University), who examines the pattern of settlement for each region; Magnus Artursson (Swedish Heritage), who discusses settlement structure and organization; Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (Cambridge University), whose analysis of households leads to a series of models with contrasting activities and use of space for each region; Maria Vretemark (who co-ordinated osteological and macro-botanical analysis for all three projects) summarizes subsistence strategies; and Joanna Sofaer (Southampton University) who examines evidence for technological and craft developments.
The project concentrated on the regional distribution, structure and organization of households and settlements. Two competing systems were recognized, one of unfortified farmsteads distributed relatively evenly within the landscape, and another that saw the nucleation of people in larger (fortified) tell sites. Particular focus in the volume is given to reconstructing houses and settlement, and on methods for calculating the number of people that could have lived in each household, from each of the three study areas, in the early, middle and late Bronze Age. A second focus was on the formation of political systems, influenced at a local economic level by specific land use, and over wider areas through exchange of materials and products. A 2,000-year long-term perspective was taken to see whether small-scale changes in the economy and the environment affected, and were affected by, large-scale socio-political change, using social hierarchy and obligations between different levels in society as key indicators.
A dichotomy is noted between those areas that saw early development of new political systems, but which in the later period seem to have resisted the development of urbanism. The study examines the duality of Bronze Age culture through the closed world created by local distinctiveness (material culture, local farms, barrows and boundaries) and the openness demonstrated by exchange systems (metalwork, luxury items) subject to long-distance connections. Three economies are discussed: the political, the ritual and the domestic. Within these parameters new rules of inheritance and identity were created, alliances formed and ruling elites developed.
Over the length of period studied it is argued that the secondary products revolution acted as a stimulus to economic development and trade during the third millennium bc, with maritime and riverine communities complementing land-based cultures and enabling the distribution of large quantities of metals during the second millennium. The growth in widespread travel saw the development of common ritual and social institutions, as well as the spread of amber, tin, bronze ingots, horses, chariots, composite bows and long swords among other cultural material in a wide zone from the Urals to northern Europe, and from Mycenae to Wessex. After 3000 bc major changes included the creation of open landscapes and agro-pastoralism, while technological change was dominated by the introduction of bronze and the development of trade-based polities, leading ultimately to urbanization and imperial systems of government.
This is a book which has woven an easily readable narrative around the results of a long-term, complex research project which used three distinct regions and comparative recording systems to enable better understanding of Bronze Age cultures within a north–south band across Europe. The text is supported by carefully crafted tables, graphs and graphics, including colourful reconstructions of houses and settlements, which unfortunately are repeated in black and white within the chapters. It would have helped the authors and reader if additional illustrations could have been used, rather than duplicating work already reproduced in colour.
