Mette Løvschal
Biographic Data
| ID | 76702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mette Løvschal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mette |
| FAMILY NAME | Løvschal |
| SIGNATURE | LØVSCHAL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3084-0524 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 83 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Land Tenure and Resilience in Early Iron Age northern Denmark investigated using high-definition dating
The Early Iron Age in southern Scandinavia is often seen as a period of landscape degradation and unsustainable economic practices: Celtic fields expand and the open land with heath and grass pasture reaches a peak, sometimes with episodes of sand drift. However, past land tenure may have been more resilient than such conceptualisations imply. At Aalborg Barracks, northern Jutland, Denmark, an Early Iron Age landscape with Celtic fields, a fence,…
Chemical fertilizers trigger the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event
In Western Denmark, commercial agriculture is displacing nutrient-poor heaths—a long-established anthropogenic shrubland. Chemical fertilizers are essential to this transformation. This paper explores the historical erasure of the heaths as a process of Holocene-to-Anthropocene state change propelled by the industrialization of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Working against the universality of Anthropocene discourses that presume a clean bre…
A forested form of life
For much of prehistory, the landscapes of southeast Norway were deeply shaped by dense forests. Yet archaeological narratives of the period from around 2350 BCE onward—the Late Neolithic and Nordic Bronze Age—have largely emphasized episodes of forest clearance and agrarian expansion, mirroring human-landscape developments elsewhere in Scandinavia. This focus has left more persistent landscapes and their associated “forms of life”, particularly t…
Agropastoral possibilism and the trajectorial affordances of Danish inland heaths
History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture, and/or manuring. At different points in time, th…
Ancestral commons theorized
The emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how thes…
New Human-landscape Relations in the Face of Global Environmental Crises
The current global crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, waterway pollution, and land-system change need far-reaching collective action, with major implications for future human-landscape relations. However, whereas there has been a radical acceleration in green solutions brought forward within science and technology, less attention has been paid to their social integration and long-term sustainability. Based on experiences with a large-sc…
Ancestral commons
During the third millennium BC, new types of anthropogenic landscape emerged across northern Europe: heathlands and pasture. These open landscapes afforded mobile pastoralism and the arena for a new funerary practice: barrow building. Here, the authors define this entanglement of people, animals and landscapes as a literal and figurative 'ancestral commons'. Focusing on western Jutland, they combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to…
A sense of direction
This brief note points toward new potentials that lie at the interface between research on landscape archaeology and cognitive science. Recent advances in the cognitive and neural sciences have sharpened our understanding of spatial cognition, by providing new explanations for how the brain reduces the dimensionality of complex topography and geography for effective navigation. This research suggests that space is represented in grid-like structu…
Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe
Heathlands are unique cultural landscapes that once existed across vast stretches of northern Europe. Their deep-time persistence has formed an intrinsic part of economic and cultural practices. Such a complex interaction requires interdisciplinary approaches, including archaeology, across multiple regions to fully grasp all its aspects. The authors of this article review how research has been conducted in prehistoric heathlands across six nation…
Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology
The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage-all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. …
Europe's Early Fieldscapes
De-/Fencing Grasslands
Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, …
Aldersro wetland-settlement complex
In southern Scandinavia, the Early Iron Age transition is characterised by radical ideological and organisational changes involving new material practices of sorting, delimiting, depositing and discarding artefacts, humans and nonhumans, in both wetlands and drylands. However, settlements and wetland areas are mostly excavated separately, and the deeper relationship between these practices and associated spheres remains somewhat inconclusive. Ald…
Anthropogenic heathlands
Focusing on the North European heathlands, this project investigates how self-organised communities in the past established large-scale grazing regimes. By considering changes in their particular forms of disturbance, exhaustion, autonomy and collaboration, the author envisages a new archaeology of emergent multispecies entanglements across a deep-time scale
The logics of enclosure
Invasive schemes involving the erection of land tenure boundaries are currently spreading quickly across vast areas throughout the globe, turning former unfenced forests and grasslands into closed‐off parcels. These processes pose intriguing questions about the deep history of colonizing assemblages consisting of particular tenure practices, temporalities, and technologies, as well as their potential long‐term repercussions. This article expands …
Low and variable
Are goats the new elephants in the room? Changing land-use strategies in Greater Mara, Kenya
Directionality and axiality in the Bronze Age
A fireplace represents one of the most fundamental and time-transgressive gathering points for humans. However, when situated in pits that are organized in lines running sometimes hundreds of metres, fire pits represent a significant challenge in terms of interpretation, and may evidence a particular perception of space. This paper argues that in a Bronze Age context, pits associated with fire remains marked out directionality and axiality in the…
Human sacrifice and value
Circumstantial evidence of non-pollen palynomorph palaeoecology
Governing martial traditions
Borum Eshøj Revisited – Bronze Age monumental burial traditions in eastern Jutland, Denmark
Borum Eshøj is one of the internationally most famous monuments from the Nordic Bronze Age, key to understanding burial customs, social identities and societies. Its uniqueness is reflected in its extraordinarily well-preserved oak log coffin burials, its landscape setting in a distinct barrow group and its complex monumental architecture. Since 1988, new investigations have been conducted at the barrow group, and in 2011, the remains of the clas…
Lines of Landscape Organization
This paper presents a comparative landscape perspective on the Late Bronze Age landscape boundaries in southern Britain, obtained from S kovbjerg M oraine, D enmark. Using Delaunay triangulation as well as classic distribution analyses, it demonstrates that some forms of landscape division articulated already established use‐patterns, while others intercepted the central lines of movement and conflicted with previous ways of organizing the landsc…
Repeating boundaries – repertoires of landscape regulations in southern Scandinavia in the Late Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age
Towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, linear boundaries such as enclosed farmsteads, field divisions, and pit zone alignments emerged and gradually permeated the landscapes of southern Scandinavia on multiple scales. This article suggests the concept of a ‘repertoire’ as a way of approaching this phenomenon. The repertoire consisted of different topological operations (e.g. plot definition, demarcation, and enclosure), constructed by different …
From Neural Synapses to Culture-Historical Boundaries
This paper contributes with a study of how something that is initially introduced as a ‘technology of spatial distribution’ develops into a ‘technology of the mind’. Boundaries are a phenomenon deeply rooted in social perception and cognitive categorization, which also involves material processes that can sometimes be studied in an archaeological record. In later prehistory, the physical instantiation of this technology offered a solution to a wi…
Emerging Boundaries
This article proposes a processual ontology for the emergence of man-made, linear boundaries across northwestern Europe, particularly in the first millennium BC. Over a significant period of time, these boundaries became newways of organizing the landscape and settlements-a phenomenon that has proved possible to trace in three different regions within this geographic area. As these new forms of boundaries were managed in comparable ways, appliedi…
Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology
The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage-all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. …
The logics of enclosure
Invasive schemes involving the erection of land tenure boundaries are currently spreading quickly across vast areas throughout the globe, turning former unfenced forests and grasslands into closed‐off parcels. These processes pose intriguing questions about the deep history of colonizing assemblages consisting of particular tenure practices, temporalities, and technologies, as well as their potential long‐term repercussions. This article expands …
Directionality and axiality in the Bronze Age
A fireplace represents one of the most fundamental and time-transgressive gathering points for humans. However, when situated in pits that are organized in lines running sometimes hundreds of metres, fire pits represent a significant challenge in terms of interpretation, and may evidence a particular perception of space. This paper argues that in a Bronze Age context, pits associated with fire remains marked out directionality and axiality in the…
Circumstantial evidence of non-pollen palynomorph palaeoecology
Lines of Landscape Organization
This paper presents a comparative landscape perspective on the Late Bronze Age landscape boundaries in southern Britain, obtained from S kovbjerg M oraine, D enmark. Using Delaunay triangulation as well as classic distribution analyses, it demonstrates that some forms of landscape division articulated already established use‐patterns, while others intercepted the central lines of movement and conflicted with previous ways of organizing the landsc…
Ancestral commons theorized
The emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how thes…
Anthropogenic heathlands
Focusing on the North European heathlands, this project investigates how self-organised communities in the past established large-scale grazing regimes. By considering changes in their particular forms of disturbance, exhaustion, autonomy and collaboration, the author envisages a new archaeology of emergent multispecies entanglements across a deep-time scale
Low and variable
Governing martial traditions
Ancestral commons
During the third millennium BC, new types of anthropogenic landscape emerged across northern Europe: heathlands and pasture. These open landscapes afforded mobile pastoralism and the arena for a new funerary practice: barrow building. Here, the authors define this entanglement of people, animals and landscapes as a literal and figurative 'ancestral commons'. Focusing on western Jutland, they combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to…
Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe
Heathlands are unique cultural landscapes that once existed across vast stretches of northern Europe. Their deep-time persistence has formed an intrinsic part of economic and cultural practices. Such a complex interaction requires interdisciplinary approaches, including archaeology, across multiple regions to fully grasp all its aspects. The authors of this article review how research has been conducted in prehistoric heathlands across six nation…
From Neural Synapses to Culture-Historical Boundaries
This paper contributes with a study of how something that is initially introduced as a ‘technology of spatial distribution’ develops into a ‘technology of the mind’. Boundaries are a phenomenon deeply rooted in social perception and cognitive categorization, which also involves material processes that can sometimes be studied in an archaeological record. In later prehistory, the physical instantiation of this technology offered a solution to a wi…
Agropastoral possibilism and the trajectorial affordances of Danish inland heaths
History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture, and/or manuring. At different points in time, th…
Are goats the new elephants in the room? Changing land-use strategies in Greater Mara, Kenya
Repeating boundaries – repertoires of landscape regulations in southern Scandinavia in the Late Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age
Towards the end of the Late Bronze Age, linear boundaries such as enclosed farmsteads, field divisions, and pit zone alignments emerged and gradually permeated the landscapes of southern Scandinavia on multiple scales. This article suggests the concept of a ‘repertoire’ as a way of approaching this phenomenon. The repertoire consisted of different topological operations (e.g. plot definition, demarcation, and enclosure), constructed by different …
From Neural Synapses to Culture-Historical Boundaries
This paper contributes with a study of how something that is initially introduced as a ‘technology of spatial distribution’ develops into a ‘technology of the mind’. Boundaries are a phenomenon deeply rooted in social perception and cognitive categorization, which also involves material processes that can sometimes be studied in an archaeological record. In later prehistory, the physical instantiation of this technology offered a solution to a wi…
Emerging Boundaries
This article proposes a processual ontology for the emergence of man-made, linear boundaries across northwestern Europe, particularly in the first millennium BC. Over a significant period of time, these boundaries became newways of organizing the landscape and settlements-a phenomenon that has proved possible to trace in three different regions within this geographic area. As these new forms of boundaries were managed in comparable ways, appliedi…
Lines of Landscape Organization
This paper presents a comparative landscape perspective on the Late Bronze Age landscape boundaries in southern Britain, obtained from S kovbjerg M oraine, D enmark. Using Delaunay triangulation as well as classic distribution analyses, it demonstrates that some forms of landscape division articulated already established use‐patterns, while others intercepted the central lines of movement and conflicted with previous ways of organizing the landsc…
Borum Eshøj Revisited – Bronze Age monumental burial traditions in eastern Jutland, Denmark
Borum Eshøj is one of the internationally most famous monuments from the Nordic Bronze Age, key to understanding burial customs, social identities and societies. Its uniqueness is reflected in its extraordinarily well-preserved oak log coffin burials, its landscape setting in a distinct barrow group and its complex monumental architecture. Since 1988, new investigations have been conducted at the barrow group, and in 2011, the remains of the clas…
Circumstantial evidence of non-pollen palynomorph palaeoecology
Governing martial traditions
Low and variable
Are goats the new elephants in the room? Changing land-use strategies in Greater Mara, Kenya
Directionality and axiality in the Bronze Age
A fireplace represents one of the most fundamental and time-transgressive gathering points for humans. However, when situated in pits that are organized in lines running sometimes hundreds of metres, fire pits represent a significant challenge in terms of interpretation, and may evidence a particular perception of space. This paper argues that in a Bronze Age context, pits associated with fire remains marked out directionality and axiality in the…
Human sacrifice and value
The logics of enclosure
Invasive schemes involving the erection of land tenure boundaries are currently spreading quickly across vast areas throughout the globe, turning former unfenced forests and grasslands into closed‐off parcels. These processes pose intriguing questions about the deep history of colonizing assemblages consisting of particular tenure practices, temporalities, and technologies, as well as their potential long‐term repercussions. This article expands …
Europe's Early Fieldscapes
De-/Fencing Grasslands
Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, …
Aldersro wetland-settlement complex
In southern Scandinavia, the Early Iron Age transition is characterised by radical ideological and organisational changes involving new material practices of sorting, delimiting, depositing and discarding artefacts, humans and nonhumans, in both wetlands and drylands. However, settlements and wetland areas are mostly excavated separately, and the deeper relationship between these practices and associated spheres remains somewhat inconclusive. Ald…
Anthropogenic heathlands
Focusing on the North European heathlands, this project investigates how self-organised communities in the past established large-scale grazing regimes. By considering changes in their particular forms of disturbance, exhaustion, autonomy and collaboration, the author envisages a new archaeology of emergent multispecies entanglements across a deep-time scale
A sense of direction
This brief note points toward new potentials that lie at the interface between research on landscape archaeology and cognitive science. Recent advances in the cognitive and neural sciences have sharpened our understanding of spatial cognition, by providing new explanations for how the brain reduces the dimensionality of complex topography and geography for effective navigation. This research suggests that space is represented in grid-like structu…
Anthropogenic Heathlands in Prehistoric Atlantic Europe
Heathlands are unique cultural landscapes that once existed across vast stretches of northern Europe. Their deep-time persistence has formed an intrinsic part of economic and cultural practices. Such a complex interaction requires interdisciplinary approaches, including archaeology, across multiple regions to fully grasp all its aspects. The authors of this article review how research has been conducted in prehistoric heathlands across six nation…
Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology
The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage-all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. …
New Human-landscape Relations in the Face of Global Environmental Crises
The current global crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, waterway pollution, and land-system change need far-reaching collective action, with major implications for future human-landscape relations. However, whereas there has been a radical acceleration in green solutions brought forward within science and technology, less attention has been paid to their social integration and long-term sustainability. Based on experiences with a large-sc…
Ancestral commons
During the third millennium BC, new types of anthropogenic landscape emerged across northern Europe: heathlands and pasture. These open landscapes afforded mobile pastoralism and the arena for a new funerary practice: barrow building. Here, the authors define this entanglement of people, animals and landscapes as a literal and figurative 'ancestral commons'. Focusing on western Jutland, they combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to…
Ancestral commons theorized
The emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how thes…
Agropastoral possibilism and the trajectorial affordances of Danish inland heaths
History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture, and/or manuring. At different points in time, th…
Land Tenure and Resilience in Early Iron Age northern Denmark investigated using high-definition dating
The Early Iron Age in southern Scandinavia is often seen as a period of landscape degradation and unsustainable economic practices: Celtic fields expand and the open land with heath and grass pasture reaches a peak, sometimes with episodes of sand drift. However, past land tenure may have been more resilient than such conceptualisations imply. At Aalborg Barracks, northern Jutland, Denmark, an Early Iron Age landscape with Celtic fields, a fence,…
Chemical fertilizers trigger the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event
In Western Denmark, commercial agriculture is displacing nutrient-poor heaths—a long-established anthropogenic shrubland. Chemical fertilizers are essential to this transformation. This paper explores the historical erasure of the heaths as a process of Holocene-to-Anthropocene state change propelled by the industrialization of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Working against the universality of Anthropocene discourses that presume a clean bre…
Geography (20 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (17 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · History (13 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (9 works) · Biology (8 works) · History (8 works) · Bronze Age (6 works) · Sociology (6 works)