The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations

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Cambridge University Press, Dec 8, 2005 - History - 449 pages
Winner of the 2006 SAA Book Award The Bronze Age represents an age of unprecedented social transformations in Europe. In a significant departure, Kristiansen and Larsson argue that much of this transformation was informed by trade, travel and regional interaction. They reconstruct the travels which occurred between the Near East, the Mediterranean and Europe to trace how the religious, political and social conceptions of Bronze Age people were shaped. Integrating two traditionally separate research fields of European and Mediterranean (classical) archaeology, this important work provides a new interpretation of the development of Europe in the Bronze Age.
 

Contents

A theoretical strategy for studying interaction
4
Odysseus a Bronze Age archetype
32
Rulership in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age
62
Europe in the Early Bronze Age an archaeological background
108
Symbolic transmission and social transformation in Bronze Age Europe
142
The cosmological structure of Bronze Age society
251
Among gods and mortals animals and humans
320
Cosmos and culture in the Bronze Age
357
towards a new Culture History
369
References
373
Index
425
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About the author (2005)

Kristian Kristiansen is Professor at the Department of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg. His previous publications include Europe before History (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Social Transformation in Archaeology (2000) (with Mike Rowlands). He was the co-founder and first president of the European Association of Archaeologists and is a member of the Swedish Academy of History and Letters. Thomas Larsson is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Umeå. He is the co-editor of Approaches to Swedish Archaeology (with Hans Lundmark) (British Archaeological Reports, 1989) and monographs on the Scandinavian Bronze Age including The Bronze Age Metalwork in Southern Sweden: Aspects of Social and Spatial Organization 1800-500 BC (1986).

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