The Chief and His Sword? Some Thoughts on the Swordbearer’s Rank in the Early Nordic Bronze Age

Bunnefeld, Jan‐Heinrich

doi:10.1017/9781316884522.014

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Warriors as a Challenge: Violence, Rock Art, and the Preservation of Social Cohesion During the Nordic Bronze Age

Horn

2022

Eur. j. archaeol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Warriors as a Challenge: Violence, Rock Art, and the Preservation of Social Cohesion During the Nordic Bronze Age

Horn

2022

Eur. j. archaeol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Most Deserve to Be Forgotten – Could the Southern Scandinavian Rock Art Memorialize Heroes?

Horn

2022

Rock Art and Memory in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Patterns of Socio-economic Cultural Transformations in Neolithic and Bronze Age Societies in the Central Northern European Plain

Brozio,

Kneisel,

Schaefer-Di Maida

et al. 2024

Quantitative Archaeology and Archaeological Modelling

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Does history repeat itself? What causes and mechanisms of action are at work in prehistoric societies? These are two questions we want to tackle in a longue durée perspective. In order to do so we bring together two main epochs in human history in the central northern European Plain: the Neolithic and the Bronze Age of northern Germany. In this timeframe we want to identify patterns of socio-economic cultural transformations.Consequently, the reconstruction of the causes and mechanisms of action in prehistoric societies are essential. In order to increase our knowledge of potential triggers and drivers of transformations, different economic, demographic, and socio-cultural data as well as climate data will be combined for a timeline of about 3500 years. As a new approach the concept of capitals by Bourdieu will be applied to construct comparable diachronic measurements for our different data sets of Material Culture. This allows for the first-time statistical analyses and quantitatively tested combinations of driving factors and socio-environmental responses. This will allow the identification of comparable patterns of transformation and how differently organised societies in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age reacted to comparable changes.

show abstract

The Chief and His Sword? Some Thoughts on the Swordbearer’s Rank in the Early Nordic Bronze Age

Cited by 5 publications

References 9 publications

Warriors as a Challenge: Violence, Rock Art, and the Preservation of Social Cohesion During the Nordic Bronze Age

Warriors as a Challenge: Violence, Rock Art, and the Preservation of Social Cohesion During the Nordic Bronze Age

Most Deserve to Be Forgotten – Could the Southern Scandinavian Rock Art Memorialize Heroes?

Patterns of Socio-economic Cultural Transformations in Neolithic and Bronze Age Societies in the Central Northern European Plain

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About