Abstract
In this article, we identify and discuss Nordic Bronze Age interspecies relationships through a relational approach that is open to ontologies that differ from our own. Drawing on bronze objects, faunal remains and rock art recovered from a multitude of Nordic Bronze Age sites (1700–500 BC), we outline the complex evolution and interactions of significant socioeconomic and cosmological elements such as the horse, the sun, the warrior, the sea and fish, and their relationships to life and death. We suggest that these elements may be seen as interconnected parts of an entangled whole, which represents a specific Nordic Bronze Age cosmology, which developed between 1600 and 1400 BC, and combined local, archaic world views and foreign influences.
Highlights
It is well-established that ships and horses were vitally important to people in southern Scandinavia during the Bronze Age (Kaul 1998, 2004; Kveiborg 2019; Ling 2008; Ling et al 2018)
Did ships and horses serve as means of transportation, they were powerful symbols that characterised an upper societal rung, and acted as liminal elements that explained complex cosmological phenomena, such as the sun’s journey across the sky and the transport of the dead from one world to another (Kaul 1998, 2004, 2005; Armstrong Oma 2013; Johannsen 2014; Kveiborg 2019). This is evident in the rich archaeological record of rock carvings as well as ornamented bronze objects and horse bones and teeth from burials and votive depositions from the Nordic Bronze Age (Table 1)
Similar suggestions were made regarding horses and birds and birds and humans, and much research lends credibility to the idea that metamorphoses, hybrid creatures and liminal transfers were essential to Nordic Bronze Age life worlds to a much greater extent than they are today (Goldhahn 2019)
Summary
It is well-established that ships and horses were vitally important to people in southern Scandinavia during the Bronze Age (circa 1700–500 BC) (Kaul 1998, 2004; Kveiborg 2019; Ling 2008; Ling et al 2018). Did ships and horses serve as means of transportation, they were powerful symbols that characterised an upper societal rung, and acted as liminal elements that explained complex cosmological phenomena, such as the sun’s journey across the sky and the transport of the dead from one world to another (Kaul 1998, 2004, 2005; Armstrong Oma 2013; Johannsen 2014; Kveiborg 2019) This is evident in the rich archaeological record of rock carvings as well as ornamented bronze objects and horse bones and teeth from burials and votive depositions from the Nordic Bronze Age (Table 1). Sea/water is linked to death and perceived as an avenue to the underworld?, with Fish and ship as associates
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