Bronze Age Rock Art in Iberia and Scandinavia

Words, Warriors, and Long-distance Metal Trade

Johan Ling, Marta Díaz-Guardamino, Christian Horn, John Koch, Zofia Anna Stos-Gale

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9798888571057
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Discusses new evidence of interactions between Scandinavia and Iberia during the Bronze Age and cross references warrior iconography in both societies. Recent research has uncovered new evidence of long-distance interactions between Scandinavia and Iberia during the Late Bronze Age. Advances in various lines of inquiry, such as 3D recording of rock art, iconography, metals and amber sourcing, linguistics, and, to some extent, more indirect indications from human remains, as reflected by strontium and aDNA results, have made this possible. The main goal of this book is to cross reference Iberian Late Bronze Age warrior iconography with Scandinavian warrior iconography. However, we will also account for links based on archeometallurgical evidence, linguistics, and other lines of inquiry, such as Baltic Amber, and metal artifacts. The results have been produced within the framework of the RAW project, an international undertaking funded by the Swedish Research Council. The RAW project is motivated by the discovery of isotopic and chemical evidence for Nordic Bronze Age artifacts made of copper that originated in the Iberian Peninsula. These findings led to re-opening two long known, but poorly explained, phenomena: 1) numerous shared motifs and close formal parallels in the rock art of Scandinavia and Iberian 'warrior' stelae, and 2) a large body of inherited words shared by the Celtic and Germanic languages, but not the other Indo-European branches. An integrated explanation for the three phenomena (Iberian metal in Scandinavia, parallels in Bronze Age rock carvings, and Celto-Germanic vocabulary) could now be formulated as a testable hypothesis: an episode in the Bronze Age when materials and ideas were exchanged over long distances between Scandinavia and the Atlantic West, including the Iberian Peninsula.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Swedish Rock Art Research Series
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1. Introduction and outline
• 2. Background
• 3. Aspects of social organization, long distance exchange, and warriorhood
• 4. Shared copper sources between Bronze Age communities in Atlantic Europe
• 5. Iberian and Scandinavian Late Bronze Age rock art: Comparing landscape contexts
• 6. Comparing Scandinavian and Iberian warrior iconography
• 7. Linguistic aspects on the warrior iconography in Iberia and Scandinavia
• 8. Bronze Age contacts between Scandinavia, Iberia, and the Atlantic communities
• Bibliography