The Brå Cauldron and the Danish Early Iron Age

Abstract

Professor Conrad Engelhardt, who was himself responsible for the excavation of the four great finds of Thorsbjærg, Vimose, Nydam and Kragehul, gave us in his Denmark in the Early Iron Age (illustrated by recent discoveries in the Peat Mosses of Slesvig) our first comprehensive picture of Danish archaeology in the centuries immediately before and after the birth of Christ. His book was published in English in London in 1866 and the engravings of the Nydam boat and the Thorsbjærg woollen trousers have been commonplaces of archaeological teaching ever since. Engelhardt lived and worked in stirring times—his excavations at Nydam had to be discontinued ‘when the two Allied German Powers, in the heart of the winter of 1864, assailed Denmark and conquered South Jutland’; and he was writing only thirty years from the time when C. J. Thomsen had formally proposed that the antiquities of the Danish prehistoric period should be divided into three distinct ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron. Engelhardt adopted Worsaae's classification of the Danish Iron Age into three periods, the Early Iron Age which he dated from 250 B.C. to A.D. 450, a transition period extending to the close of the 7th century, and the Late Iron Age terminating with the introduction of Christianity in the year 1000. He discussed whether the changes implicit in the Early Iron Age were the result of pacific intercourse or commercial relations with nations of higher civilization, rejects these, and says ‘the higher state of civilization was the result of an invasion, for in no other way can the sudden appearance of damascened weapons, of materials hitherto unknown, of horses, arts and letters, be satisfactorily explained’.