UNIVERSITY HOMEPAGE
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Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics
Section for Prehistoric Archaeology
Current research
| Staff group Staff group:1. The Toft Parcels in Viking Age Vorbasse The excavations of the Iron and Viking Age villages at Vorbasse – nowadays a small town in the midst of Jutland – constituted a landmark in the understanding of the settlement history of Denmark. For the first time, the genesis of the village could be traced back to about 200 BC, and its various phases could be documented until the end of the Viking Age. These results had international resonance because they were, and still are, an unprecedented achievement in the field of prehistoric archaeology. What has not reached the international scientific community, however, is the historical and geographical analysis linking the latest prehistoric to the subsequent historic phase of the village. Central to this study is the parcel system of the village itself (the tofts ) and the regular open field division (the systematic pattern of holders in the runrigs ) in the tillage surrounding the village. With the help of advanced techniques involving Geographical Information Systems, completely new insights have been achieved. These insights have consequences not only for the archaeological understanding of settlement history at Vorbasse and elsewhere, but also for discussions in agricultural history and human geography. 2. Settlement and road systems in Eastern Jutland Settlements and infrastructure are two deeply interrelated entities. Although the Danish archaeological record is one of the densest in the world, concrete evidence of prehistoric settlements and their related road network is extremely fragmentary and rare. There are many reasons for this lack of knowledge, one of them possibly being a lack of suitable methods. Eastern Jutland is one of the best archaeologically surveyed areas in Denmark. More importantly, the area has been used as a case study for the development of indicative models, and MoesgaardMuseum has carried out many archaeological investigations with high standards of documentation. These conditions make the area an ideal place to develop methods to study the interrelationship between settlement and infrastructure in a long-term perspective. Focus of the study has hitherto been the main road network and its relationship to military organization. The next step is to study the local road network and its relationship to observations of archaeological remains for different periods. 3. Danish archaeology under the German occupation 1940-1945 The German occupation of Denmark from 1940 to 1945 had many negative consequences for people and society. Although it may sound strange, the occupation had very positive effects for the discipline of prehistoric archaeology in terms of public interest and paid positions. This effect was not imposed or supported directly by the occupants; it must merely be seen as a national reaction against the German nazi ideology. Archaeology became an ideological battlefield, as it were, with different frontiers: one between the Nazis and Danish conservatives and one between conservatives and communists. At that time, German archaeology was divided into two competing organizations: "Amt Rosenberg" and "Ahnenerbe". The latter became the "winner" of the peculiar competition over representing sound nazi archaeology. This success lasted for their representatives even after the collapse of the nazi regime. "Ahnenerbe" was part of the SS organization under the leadership of the Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler. The archaeological part of the organization sought to gain influence amongst archaeologists by means of a seemingly sober scientific practice and strategic adjustments in the archaeologies of occupied countries. Their interpretations were an essential element of nazi ideology. One must therefore ask: What were the strategic goals of German nazi archaeologists? What were the fundamental elements of nazi ideology? How did nazi archaeologists operate in occupied Denmark? 1. Bronze Age Barrows Research project funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. skelhoej.natmus.dk.
A study of the spatio-temporal organisation and syntax of the Late Iron Age settlements in Jutland, particularly the settlement of Nørre Snede. The project focuses upon the significance and character of the emergence and development of the village, with emphasis on the long-term processes of clarifying rights and obligations in the new and closer coexistence implied in the village and expressed in inheritance structures, property rights and land regulation. The concept of relative time in archaeology and the development of methods of relative-chronological analyses for excavations based on heuristic optimization algorithms. Harvesting in the Danish Stone and Bronze Age: tools and the techniques Prehistoric flint harvesting tools are characterized by a lacquer-like gloss that can be identified with the naked eye. Microscope analyses – combined with experiments – give information about tool use, intensity of work, and hafting. Functional analyses of flint sickles thus supplement the insights given by the few and disparate grain finds from this phase of Danish Prehistory. My research constitutes a systematic analysis of sickles from the Danish Neolithic and Bronze Age, with special emphasis on the development of harvesting technology and strategies. The present focus of my research is on large flint knives as well as regular metal sickles, both from the late Bronze Age. How are the two versions of harvesting implements to be interpreted? Are the flint sickles the result of a certain technological resistance among some people or groups, or do they reflect uneven access to metal in time and space? Are the Bronze sickles actual tools, or are they to be perceived as BARRER or Gerätegeld? These questions are pursued by use-wear analyses combined with research into the archaeological find contexts. 1. The Age of the Dagger: Cultural Localisations and Cross-Societal Bonds inEurope 2800-1500 BC Metallurgy is locally situated practice, but it also travelled widely as knowledge, things and raw materials during the period that formed the Bronze Age. This ability to be at once local and macro-regional will be explored from the perspective of globalization in analogue with the multifaceted interconnectedness of our modern world, the idea of complex although systemic interdependency between local culture and global trends. The starting point of the project is my recently concluded fieldwork on and around the find place of an extraordinarily rich ritual deposition of metal objects of local and foreign origin dating to c. 2000 BC (Pile, Scania). The “Age of the Dagger” is a period in which far-reaching contacts took place by way of exchange and the movement of people, images, knowledge and goods, and it seems pertinent to make use of such terms as homogenization, fragmentation, and hybridity in material culture and identity to describe the practical and processual outcome of their interplay. 2. International research network ‘Cultural Identity and Global Process in the Bronze Age’ The aim of this network is to build an international research project on Bronze Age cultural mobility, and especially to enhance knowledge development and exchange across national borders. Today’s Bronze Age research is predominantly national in scope and rarely cross-disciplinary. This is incompatible with the globalisation-like interactions that recent research has pinpointed as a central trait of the Bronze Age, and which is supported by front-line natural sciences applicable to archaeology. PhD students What is a cultural inheritance? Do we have a historical identity? What role does archaeology play in today’s society? With these questions I attempt to see how archaeology is used by politicians and by archaeologists themselves. Is archaeology a tool of the nation state? Can archaeology be used to make people understand their own significance in society and other ways of living and thinking? My method is to look at the archaeological discourse, together with the political discourse around concepts such as cultural heritage, cultural environment, prehistoric relics, and not least how they are used together with the word ”our”. Our cultural heritage is a concept that both includes and excludes groups of people. | |||||
| Sacred space in a time of religious change: cognitive and phenomenological aspects of religiosity and the ritual environment in a long-term perspective Religious practice is a universal phenomenon traced back to our earliest sapiens predecessors. Still, one must presume that humans are born without any specific religious knowledge. Such knowledge is therefore attained by the individual through external inputs, which are both socially transferred from person to person and received from interaction with the surrounding material culture. The coupling of these two aspects of religion is an overlooked subject matter in the interpretation of religiosity, as well as in the study of material culture. The main purpose of the project is therefore to establish a theoretical apparatus for investigating the interconnected nature of religious ideas and religious materiality. Through a combination of modern cognitive science, especially distributed cognition and a phenomenological analysis of religious buildings, the project will address this lacuna and examine how sacred spaces influence the way in which the individual establishes and retains authoritative, religious systems. When the wheels started turning... Technological change in a long-term perspective My doctoral research deals with the historical interplay between technology and cognition. The empirical focus of the project is on a few selected cases from the development of wheels and wheeled transport in Western Eurasia from the 4th millennium BCE onwards. I am particularly interested in how the experience of wheels and wheeled transport influenced people’s ways of conceptualizing other domains of life, for instance their religious cosmology. To analyse these relationships, the project draws on work from a range of disciplines concerned with human cognition and human technology. A related interest is the epistemology of archaeology. I am also interested in zooarchaeology, and my previous research involved developing and employing osteomorphological methods. I have focused in particular on the role of draught cattle in Neolithic Europe. The Burial Mound cemeteries of Bahrain Between Indus and Mesopotamia: The rise, culmination and decline of the Dilmun state At the close of the third millennium, the Dilmun culture was united in a small-scale kingdom on the island of Bahrain in the Arabian Gulf. The kingdom, which was centrally located between the major players of its time - Indus and Mesopotamia – flourished as a consequence of this key position in the trade networks. In this time of prosperity the Dilmunites constructed more than 75,000 burial mounds concentrated in nine vast cemeteries. The cemetery of Karzakkan with its 9000 burial mounds, of which 2000 have been excavated, constitutes the empirical nucleus of the project. The main aim of the project is to gain an understanding of the development of social positions and social status though a study of the architecture of the burial mounds and variation in the funerary equipment associated with the tombs. The roles played in life by the individuals interred in the tombs are indirectly mirrored though the character of the funerals they were given. It is thus possible to obtain information about central aspects of the social organization of Dilmun. The project also intends to compare the understanding of social positions and status established though the analysis of the burial mounds with other testimonies from contemporary settlements and temples to account for the rise, culmination and decline of the Dilmun state. Land Use Strategies in the Danish Bronze and Early Iron Age Since the Neolithic, agriculture has constituted the basis of prehistoric societies and therefore it naturally represents a very important subject of research. This is not only because agriculture provided the most basic products for human existence, i.e. food, but also because the strategies that were used within the agricultural system influenced everyday life and the organisation of the agrarian communities. Land use strategies thus represent an important approach for understanding the dynamics and complexity of prehistoric societies. Death in the landscape: an investigation of space, cemeteries and choreography This PhD project investigates the possible connections between material culture and choreographed movements. Due to the physical situatedness of human beings, we necessarily mediate our confrontation with the world through things material. We engage in a material world by being material ourselves. It is this bodily predisposition that forms the starting point of the present PhD project. It seeks to investigate how human movements among material culture are orchestrated by way of a sensuous choreography that not only facilitates wayfinding and place making, but which also allows human beings to anticipate and navigate socially, emotionally and conceptually. In other words, the project's premise is an appreciation of material culture as a phenomenon that is suspended between being shaped by human beings and at the same time itself shaping human beings.
Postdoctoral, associated researchers and emiriti :
Research assistant Andres S. Dobat : My primary research interest is European societies in the first millennium AD and the beginning of the Medieval Period, with a focus on the northern hemisphere. With my research, I would like to paint a picture of the interplay and development of ideological, economic, military and political aspects of society. The primary goal of my research is to interpret the social context in which history occurred. In my PhD dissertation, I discussed different aspects of the process of urbanisation and the formation of states, proceeding from the development of Hedeby/Slesvig in North Germany. Currently, I am leading a research project on the Trelleborg Fortresses from the end of the 10th century AD (see the project website: www.kongensborge.dk). In addition, I am working on investigations of the ‘productive site’ of Füsing, close to Slesvig in North Germany. | |||||
 | Selected finds from the productive site of Füsing, close to Schleswig in North Germany | ||||
| Professor emeritus Henrik Thrane : My research has centered on settlement archaeology, with special emphasis on the Island of Fyn in a diachronic study. The Bronze Age of southwest Fyn around Voldtofte and the Migration period of east Fyn around Gudme have been central to this research; c.f. my books on the Tumulus "Lusehøj ved Voldtofte" (1984) and "Fynske yngre broncealdergrave" (2004). At the moment I am preparing a more intensive study of the Bronze Age Settlement. Another current study concerns the Migration period "Kleinkunst" i.e. male and animal bronze figurines. It includes a catalogue of these figurines and attempts to shed light on the purpose of these small Germanic images. A book on the archaeological passion of King Frederik VII and his role in the formative period of Danish archaeology at the middle of the 19th century is well under way. In addition, I will be publishing various excavations: the Kirkebjerg settlement, Bronze Age hoards and Iron Age finds from Luristan. The first part of the latter study was published in 2001 as "Excavations at Tepe Guran in Luristan". Birgit Rasmussen: My current research is centred on grave finds, especially the Slusegård cemetery situated on the southern coast of Bornholm. With its 1500 graves, dating from the pre-Roman to the end of the Late Roman Iron Age, it takes a special position among the Danish Iron Age cemeteries. Using multivariate analyses features in grave structures and grave goods are investigated and studied through a period of 500 years. Main focus is how the material culture is used as symbols of status and gender, and to identify the hierarchy of an Iron Age society in its local setting.
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