Fig 7 - uploaded by Kristian Kristiansen
Content may be subject to copyright.
12 Reconstruction drawing of a Late Bronze Age hamlet from Holland (from Kooijmans et al. 2005. Drawing by Koen van der Velde)
Source publication
The concept of complexity demands theoretical elaboration, especially in regard to decentralized social formations such as
the Bronze Age chiefdoms of northern Europe (Artursson 2008, Goldhahn 2005, Gröhn 2004, Kristiansen 2007, Kristiansen and
Larsson 2005, Ling 2007, Nordenborg Myhre 2004). I propose that analysis of their political economy will...
Similar publications
Klavs Randsborg has made important contributions to the archaeology of the Bronze Age and later prehistoric periods, but in the 1970s he also touched upon issues such as the formation of rank in Neolithic societies. In his article ‘Social Dimensions of Early Neolithic Denmark’, he suggested that a hierarchical society arose at the transition from t...
Citations
... Modeling the Maritime Mode of Production: Colonization, Trade, and Decentralized Complexity Two recent articles (Furholt et al. 2020;Ling, Earle, and Kristiansen 2018) attempt to understand why maritime societies developed relatively complex relationships on the peripheral of more traditional agrarian-based social developments. The maritime mode of production (MMP) model considers how "decentralized complexity" was an alternative pathway toward political complexity (Kristiansen 2010). What follows is only a sketch of variables and processes that appear to energize political economies of some early maritime societies that characterized the MMP; readers can refer to the argumentation, documentation, and bibliographies of these articles for increased detail. ...
... In the Early Bronze Age, an elite social class appears to have emerged in the Vinschgau Valley, promoting the cultivation of high alpine side Valleys to ensure food supply for settlements or a chief clan. This model, proposed by Earle (1997) and adopted by Kristiansen (2010) for Jutland, suggests that local chieftains supported the establishment of new settlement space and provided livestock in exchange for services or natural goods. In the inner Alpine region, this corresponds to the function of the "Schwaighöfe" founded in the 12 th -13 th century AD. ...
The evolving human impact on the high alpine side valleys of the Alps has increasingly become the focus of the scientific community in recent decades.
Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding the integration of the newly acquired economic area into the settlement zone, the research conducted in
the Schnals Valley has proven instrumental. The extensive archeological survey, which goes beyond the conventional investigation of visible structures
or rock shelters, has led to the discovery of 20 high alpine Bronze Age sites, of which only 15% are visible above ground. This study presents compelling
evidence of an Early Bronze Age intensification that spanned the 19th and 18th centuries BC and an intensification expressed through an increase and
territorial distribution, as well as in the diversification of archeological record during the Middle Bronze Age. The cultivation of the research area
seems to have been completed approximately in the 15th century BC, with only isolated Late Bronze Age sites being added. This transition parallels the
contemporaneous development of central settlement areas, underscoring a symbiotic relationship between human activity in the high alpine regions and
the growth of lowland communities. The detailed archeological investigation of six sites provides the first insight into the Bronze Age high alpine building
culture and the interior design, in particular well constructed hearths associated with the production of secondary products. The investigated high alpine
building culture of Schnals Valley corresponds to that of inner alpine settlements, and highlights the synchronous cultural development on the valley floor
and in the high mountains. Crucially, this cultivation of the natural landscape of the Schnals Valley is intricately tied to the broader tapestry of cultural
contacts and the exchange of goods throughout Europe during the Bronze Age.
... Wat socio-politieke organisatie betreft, zal Europa in de Bronstijd een lappendeken zijn geweest, met samenlevingen die uiteenliepen van egalitair tot zeer hiërarchisch. Zo spreekt Kristiansen -op basis van gebruikssporenonderzoek van Deense zwaarden -van een krijgeraristocratie, waarbij sprake is van duaal leiderschap dat in zijn ogen grote overeenkomst vertoont met het leiderschap in de Myceense wereld (Kristiansen 1984;Kristiansen & Larsson 2005: 271-280;Kristiansen 2010;Kristiansen & Suchowska-Ducke 2015: 371-372). Hij typeert de samenlevingen in de Deense Bronstijd als networked decentralised chiefdoms (Kristiansen 2007: 73 (Lohof 1991: 83, 254-255;Theunissen 1999: 104-105) en in slechts 7% van alle graven uit die tijd zijn bronzen voorwerpen gevonden (Bourgeois & Fontijn 2012: 523). ...
In 1927, A.E. van Giffen excavated a largely levelled burial mound near the village of Drouwen in the Dutch province of Drenthe. A few years later, Van Giffen published a summary report on the excavation, in which he concentrated on the lavish inventory of the central Sögel warrior burial. In 1985-1989, J.N. Lanting carried out further research at the site of the mound and revealed a large number of soil features from the Bronze Age and early Middle Ages. This second excavation has never been published before. The present article discusses both excavations. After an evaluation of all the excavation data the author zooms in on the warrior: what was his cultural context, and how can we interpret his social status in the region? The article concludes with an analysis of the spatial pattern of which this burial mound is a part. To do so, the author looks at all the prehistoric and protohistoric burial monuments in the area between the villages of Drouwen and Borger.Van Giffen’s profile drawings of the mound section he investigated suggest two construction phases. The oldest structure, a central mound of grey sand (c. 8 m across by c. 0.80 m high), was raised over the remains of a pyre. This first mound probably dates to the Early or early Middle Bronze Age. In the 16th century BC the warrior grave was dug into this mound; posts around the grave suggest the presence of a mortuary house or fence. The mound that was associated with this grave was c. 1.60 m high, possibly elongated (26 by 15 m or less) and surrounded by an oval ditch up to 1.6 m wide, with to the north a c. 3.40-m-wide opening. Whether there were any secondary burials is unknown.In the early Middle Ages, when the surrounding ditch had long since been filled in, the mound and its immediate vicinity became the location of a cemetery with graves arranged in rows (rijengrafveld). Only a small section of this cemetery was excavated (61 graves) so that the full period it was used is uncertain. Most graves were oriented east-west. Of the investigated graves, the majority were fully excavated, and several contained traces of a coffin. The buried individuals were mostly adults. Many did not produce any grave goods, and those items that were found were - in Van Giffen’s words - ‘armelijk’, rather poor. They are mostly iron knives and ‘prikkels’ (‘goads’, iron points, of unknown function, originally attached to a rod), bronze needle cases, keys, and one brooch. Of particular interest are three strings of beads and one isolated bead. To the extent they can be dated, all grave goods are comparatively late and could well be 8th and 9th-century, indicating that the cemetery ended at some point in the 9th century. The only human remains come from a small sub-recent pit close to Grave 29 (GrM-28439: 1244 ± 21 BP, i.e. 680-876 cal AD (2σ)).It is highly unlikely that the ‘Drouwen Warrior’ was anything more than a ‘big man’ whose network extended into northern Germany and possibly even Scandinavia. Whether he actually was a warrior in life is still an open question. When he was buried, at some point in the 16th century BC, several (very) ancient burial monuments already existed nearby. The mound of the warrior may have been part of an old linear alignment of these features. Why this particular mound was chosen in the early medieval period to situate a cemetery will probably always remain a mystery, although it is tempting to think that stories about the dead man buried there 2200 years earlier were still being told in the 7th or 8th century AD. That would tie in with the current archaeological narrative of the Bronze Age warrior as a person who strove after a heroic status after death, a form of immortality, created by the stories, passed on in each generation, of his martial, cosmopolitan and adventurous life.
... The development of three-aisled houses has been driven by changes in social organisation and increasing social complexity (Kristiansen, 2010). The larger size and more elaborate internal divisions may reflect the emergence of a stratified society with hierarchical structures . ...
... However, some houses during ENBA II-III became exceedingly small, ranging 9-20 m 2 . Such small houses point to either a stratified distribution of wealth or outhouses (Earle, 2002;Kristiansen, 2010;Mikkelsen, 2013), requiring further analysis. Settlements during this period vary in organisation, with larger and smaller longhouses and economic buildings sometimes grouped as smaller hamlets or even villages (Artursson, 2015). ...
Mid and late-Holocene climate shifts are considered to have profoundly shaped demographic developments and adaptive responses of communities globally. Yet their onset, duration, and impact on Neolithic and Early Nordic Bronze Age communities in the high-latitude ranges of southern and north-western Scandinavia remain a major research gap. Here, we built on an emerging body of archaeological and paleoclimate data, encompassing 20,908 anthropogenic 14C dates and 49 climate records from the Holocene. Additionally, we gathered and correlated a new archaeological dataset of 3649 houses from southern Scandinavia and southern Norway. In this study, we utilised 6268 reliable 14C dates and 2519 dwellings to generate time series and socio-economic trends from ∼4100 to 1100 BCE.
Our study revealed three key findings: (1) A distinct lateral zonation, with variations in the duration and timing of the Holocene Thermal Maximum (∼7050–2050 BCE). In Southern Scandinavia, a warmer climate may have facilitated the spread of crop cultivation (3820–3790 BCE), coinciding with significant population growth. Neolithic communities settled in permanent two-aisled houses 90–160 years later (3700–3660 BCE). (2) The 2250 BCE (4.2 ka BP) cooling trend marked the beginning of a climate regime shift with varying duration and timing (∼3450–1450 BCE). This period coincided with demographic growth, migration, crop cultivation diversity, and the development of houses with crop storage facilities (2290–2215 BCE). (3) Severe abrupt cooling periods (∼1850–1450 BCE) corresponded to short-term demographic decline including disruptions in trade networks with continental Europe. However, repopulation and redistribution of wealth (∼1450 BCE), along with the development of stable three-aisled houses (1475–1450 BCE), underscore the resilience of food-producing economies in mitigating environmental disturbances.
... Heterarchy appears different archaeologically as it is often not associated with the accumulations of wealth and health commonly found with stratification (although notable health exceptions exist). Scholars have identified past heterarchy and societies with decentralized power networks based on careful analysis of site size, settlement patterns, wealth distribution, and social network analysis (Crumley 1995(Crumley , 2007Kristiansen 2010;Levy 1995Levy , 2012Spencer-Wood 2010). ...
... A su vez estos últimos están muy interrelacionados, lo cual da como resultado un alto coeficiente de agrupamiento local (Crossley, 2008;Brughmans, 2010, p. 36;Beauguitte y Ducruet, 2011). En general, las redes descentralizadas encuentran su expresión más común en los sistemas de mundo pequeño o small world (Watts y Strogatz, 1998;Watts, 1999) que aparecen, por ejemplo, en estructuras sociales del norte de Europa (Kristiansen, 2010) o en modelos de producción en los Andes precolombinos (Lazzari et al., 2017). ...
... En este sentido, a modo de hipótesis quizá puede considerarse la diferenciación entre las estructuras de patrones intervisuales como consecuencia de una diferente orientación económica de los grupos. No se puede olvidar que la existencia de redes descentralizadas se ha puesto frecuentemente en relación con la presencia de recursos productivos muy extendidos y difíciles de controlar desde un solo centro (Kristiansen, 2010) ahondar en profundidad en esta idea, aunque cabe resaltar algunas particularidades. Así, la estructuración en forma alargada del grupo 6 recuerda al plano urbanístico lineal que desarrollan los núcleos que se emplazan en un punto como consecuencia de la actividad que surge de una vía de paso muy frecuentada. ...
Los análisis de redes han surgido en la última década como una interesante herramienta para explicar un amplio abanico de conexiones entre lugares proporcionando nuevas posibilidades de estudio al arqueólogo. En relación con ello es el objetivo de estas páginas ahondar en su potencialidad planteando su aplicación al análisis de la ocupación de la zona meridional de los antiguos Vascones puesto que se trata de un espacio complicado de estudiar dada la multiplicidad de orígenes de los datos conocidos, la ausencia de excavaciones arqueológicas y la falta de estudios de conjunto. Partiendo de la base de que es a través de los sentidos, y en especial de la visión, como el ser humano construye su esquema del mundo circundante, se ha optado por realizar un análisis de redes de intervisibilidad como una forma de acercamiento a la ocupación de la zona durante el Hierro II (ss. III-I a.C.). De esta forma se ponen a prueba las posibilidades de interpretación que aporta esta metodología para conjuntos de datos muy heterogéneos, obteniendo hipótesis de trabajo que permiten crear las bases de futuros estudios que incluyan otros factores, como análisis de áreas de captación o redes de comunicación entre otros, que maticen los resultados aquí obtenidos. En este sentido la principal hipótesis extraída ha sido la constatación de la integración de los yacimientos conocidos hasta el momento en una red descentralizada que permite su interpretación como un conjunto de mundos afines pero no iguales.
... Warriors may have formed a social elite that ruled local communities, especially in southern Scandinavia, northern Germany, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands and Poland (Figure 1). The scale of their social power is debated, and several models have been proposed, including chiefdoms (Earle, 1987(Earle, , 1989, a decentralized system of rulership (Kristiansen, 2007(Kristiansen, , 2010, heads of extended families (Bunnefeld, 2018), or flatter hierarchies (Brück & Fontijn, 2013;Kienlin, 2015). ...
... This in turn suggests that in each local community there may have been several individuals who were accustomed to carrying out such bloodshed and who were perhaps frequently engaged in such highly stressful activities. Within a dispersed settlement pattern and unstable social organization, especially during the Early NBA (Kristiansen, 2007(Kristiansen, , 2010, this potentially created a volatile atmosphere in which fighting prowess may have been directly translated into social power, as discussed below. ...
... Thus, the status of the latter could have increased to the point of posing a challenge, especially to weaker local powers; this may have occasionally created a violent internal struggle involving bloodshed and threatening social cohesion. Such destabilizing confrontations, especially by younger successful fighters, have been observed in several societies (Flannery & Joyce, 2012) and recognized as having been present in the NBA (Childe, 1945;Earle, 2002;Kristiansen, 2010). ...
In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.
... This has made several researchers argue for a 'decentralized chiefdom' or network system (e.g. Friedman and Rowlands 1978;Kristiansen 1998;Earle 2002;Kristiansen 2010). What is central for such a system, and often becomes overlooked, is that power does not really effectively reside with a powerful chief or within a selected elite. ...
This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.
... While the landscape continued to be filled with barrows, more pressure was exerted on the available farming and grazing land due to increasing population size. Adaptations to cope with these conditions first became apparent in marginal environments, such as Thy, and later on in most other parts of Bronze Age Scandinavia (Kristiansen 2010). A range of materials, i.e. household refuse, pottery, cereal processing waste, fen peat, ash and charcoal was occasionally added to the plough soil (Bech 1993), possibly to increase soil fertility and/or to fight soil drift (Robinson 2003). ...
... Half of the livestock consisted of cattle, with pigs, sheep and goats making up the other half. Sheep were increasingly present, possibly for their resilience and wool (Kristiansen 2010). ...
... Human impact on the landscape regarding tree cutting possibly passed a threshold; after too much of the forest was cut away, the increased storminess prevented trees from growing back. This forced people to rethink their resources and increase their productivity, which is visible in the archaeological record with the introduction of a new type of furnace for metal extraction, permanent houses (i.e., abandonment of tearing houses down to use the nutrient rich soil beneath) and a new type of plough, enabling people to farm on heavy soils (Kristiansen 2010;Jensen 2013). While humans in the Early Bronze Age were consuming a diet that was isotopically identical to the Neolithic diet, Late Bronze Age humans could potentially reveal a transition towards the Iron Age diet, which is characterised by elevated δ 15 N values. ...
Despite the rich archaeological heritage present in the Limfjord region in Denmark, few palaeodietary studies using human and animal bone material from this area currently exist. This paper aims to investigate the palaeodiet as well as animal husbandry strategies in this region during prehistoric times, from the Mesolithic to the Viking Age using stable isotope analysis. New stable isotope results from almost 300 human and animal bones are presented here, as well as their comparison with previously published data. Higher δ¹⁵N values in sheep/goats than cattle suggest that cattle were more confined while the sheep/goats were allowed to roam and possibly consume salt-marsh grass. The stable isotope results reveal a rise in δ¹⁵N ratios in human individuals from the Iron Age, which is most likely related to the combined effects of fertilisation practices and aquatic protein consumption. Additionally, evidence for marine exploitation in the form of shell middens and fish remains can be linked to periods characterised by climatic deterioration.
... From a methodological point of view, most of the works on this subject discuss the intra/inter-site variability of the archaeological record, with a particular emphasis on the differences between households, settlements, architectures, distribution of resources, and prestige goods in burials, and relate the evidence to the theoretical framework derived from sociology, political economy, and anthropology (e.g. Otto 1955;Childe 1958;Gimbutas 1965;Renfrew 1972;Shennan 1975;Gilman 1981;Robb 1994;Price, Feinmann 1995;Sanjuán 1999;Cazzella, Recchia 2006;Díaz-del-Río 2006;Chapman 2008;Guidi 2009;Kristiansen 2010;Cardarelli 2015;Earle et al. 2015;Meller et al. 2016;Hansen, Müller 2017;Dolfini 2019;Iacono 2019). ...
Social stratification among Bronze Age communities
has been traditionally analysed from the point of view of material
evidence, especially in funerary contexts, where disparities in tomb
architecture or in the articulation of grave goods may indicate the
presence of groups characterised by different access to resources
and social status. Recently, advances in the field of bioarchaeology
(osteology, isotopes, aDNA) have provided new insights into the
theme of inequalities and their relationship with kinship, diet, and
mobility. In our paper, we integrate the archaeological evidence
of social stratification with bioarchaeological data from four
Bronze Age key-sites in Italy, namely Olmo di Nogara, Casinalbo
(Po Plain), Trinitapoli-Ipogeo dei Bronzi, and Toppo Daguzzo
(south-eastern Italy). The aim is to analyse the variability of health
conditions, diet, mobility, and demographic parameters within
each of these cemeteries and compare the different dynamics of
the emergence of the elite group during the central centuries of the
second millennium BC.
Our overview shows that Bronze Age societies in general converged
towards a general model in which stratification and competition
were common structural traits across the whole peninsula. The
amplitude of inequalities, however, varies from site to site, as
well as from region to region, as a consequence of different socioeconomic
backgrounds and cultural manifestations of social
hierarchies. In conclusion, we underline the role of kinship as a
factor in securing internal stability for the emerging élite and the
importance of establishing interorganisational alliances and a
common ethos with other nodes of the network.