Into the fire: Investigating the introduction of cremation to Nordic Bronze Age Denmark: A comparative study between different regions applying strontium isotope analyses and archaeological methods.

Samantha S Reiter,Anne-Louise Haack Olsen,Ulla Mannering,Marie Louise Schjellerup Jørkov,Flemming Kaul,Bjarne Henning Nielsen,Niels Algreen Møller,Karin M Frei,Jens-Henrik Bech,Peter F Biehl

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0249476

Samantha S Reiter, Anne-Louise Haack Olsen + Show 8 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249476

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: May 12, 2021
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: National Museum of Denmark, Moesgaard Museum

Abstract

Changes in funerary practices are key to the understanding of social transformations of past societies. Over the course of the Nordic Bronze Age, funerary practices changed from inhumation to cremation. The aim of this study is to shed light on this fundamental change through a cross-examination of archaeometric provenance data and archaeological discussions of the context and layouts of early cremation graves. To this end, we conducted 19 new provenance analyses of strontium isotopes from Early Nordic Bronze age contexts in Thisted County and Zealand and Late Bronze Age contexts from Thisted County and Vesthimmerland (Denmark). These data are subsequently compared with data from other extant relevant studies, including those from Late Bronze Age Fraugde on the Danish island of Fyn. Overall, the variations within our provenience data suggest that the integration and establishment of cremation may not have had a one-to-one relationship with in-migration to Nordic Bronze Age Denmark. Moreover, there seems to be no single blanket scenario which dictated the uptake of cremation as a practice within this part of Southern Scandinavia. By addressing habitus in relation to the deposition of cremations as juxtaposed with these provenance data¸ we hypothesize several potential pathways for the uptake of cremation as a new cultural practice within the Danish Nordic Bronze Age and suggest that this may have been a highly individual process, whose tempo may have been dictated by the specificities of the region(s) concerned.

Highlights

During the Early to Late Nordic Bronze Age transition (c. 1100 BC), funeral practices in Southern Scandinavia exhibited a gradual but very marked changeover
The strontium isotope analysis conducted on the Late Bronze Age contexts from Vesthimmerland ranged between 87Sr/86Sr = 0.710608–0.714090
In the Thisted County, our results reveal the presence of individuals whose isotopic values fall within the local baseline range as well as an individual whose values fall outside the local bioavailable baseline range

Summary

Introduction

During the Early to Late Nordic Bronze Age transition (c. 1100 BC), funeral practices in Southern Scandinavia exhibited a gradual but very marked changeover. Rather than continuing the extant tradition of inhuming their dead, Nordic Bronze Age peoples began to near exclusively cremate them instead [1]. Cremation was so strongly associated with Late Bronze Age contexts in Europe, that one of the dominant cultures of the time (the Urnfield Culture) takes its name from the fields of urns in which the cremated dead were placed [2]. Cremations in the Early Nordic Bronze Age (a period of time equivalent to the Central European Middle Bronze Age) included single individuals and multiple individuals buried in single or multiple contexts, which sometimes exclusively contained cremated material or, on occasion, combinations of both inhumed and cremated remains within the same deposition [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Late Bronze Age cremations were generally deposited inside specific cremation urns

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