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

Aug 2024 · Oxbow Books

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Johan Ling is Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University and is Director of the Rock Art Research Archives (SHFA) (www.shfa.se). He is a specialist in Bronze Age archaeology with a focus on Scandinavian rock art and maritime trade. Marta Díaz-Guardamino is Assistant Professor in Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK. Her specialism is in the later prehistory of Atlantic Europe, particularly in prehistoric art, material culture and monumentality. Christian Horn is Associate Professor at Gothenburg’s Department of Historical Studies and is the co-director of the Swedish Rock Art Research Archives. He is an archaeologist with broad knowledge of 4th–2nd millennium BC North and Atlantic Europe. John Koch is Research Professor at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. A historical linguist specializing in early Celtic languages with a unique multidisciplinary profile, Koch’s research includes Indo-European origins of Celtic names, words, and grammar. Zofia Anna Stos-Gale is Researcher at Gothenburg’s Department of Historical Studies. Stos-Gale is an Oxford D.Phil. in Archaeological Science. She was a co-founder there of the Isotrace Laboratory, which pioneered the use of lead isotope and elemental analysis for provenancing Bronze Age metals.