Tales of Hoards and Swordfighters in Early Bronze Age Scandinavia

The Brand New and the Broken

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6095342
AutoresLene Melheim (University of Oslo, autor de correspondencia), Christian Horn (0000-0001-8042-3748, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen47
Número1
Páginas18-41
Fecha de publicación2014-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNorwegian Archaeological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0029-3652 • E-ISSN: 1502-7678
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00293652.2014.920907
OpenAlexW2085353329
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas18
Referencias citadas38

This article focuses on the complexity of Early Bronze Age weapon depositions. While some of the deposited weapons have been disabled by intentional breakage, others seem to be more or less unused. A plausible explanation for the variability is that the surrender of lethal weapons to land or water was a means of coping with their power or agency – their individuality. We suggest that weapons, in their capacity as extensions of warriors’ bodies, may have substituted for humans in ritual depositions. The metalworkers also come into play, due to their capacities in the processes of making weapons and shaping weapon technologies. Although we consider the three depositions that we discuss to relate to rituals on the occasion of warfare, we are not aiming for a uniform explanation. In the same way as the patterned human behaviour of a ritual is a means of subsuming individual events into a greater order, so a focus on general patterns may subsume the complexity of the past by ignoring the many different events leading to, e.g., the deposition of metalwork. Far from seeing these perspectives as contradictory, we try to use three well-documented individual cases to shed light on the variability within the pattern

Agency (philosophy) · Ancient history · Archaeology · Bronze Age · Social science · Sociology · Surrender · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology