Organizing Bronze Age Societies: The Mediterranean, Central Europe, and Scandanavia Compared

The Bronze Age was a formative period in European history when the organization of landscapes, settlements, and economy reached a new level of complexity. This book presents the first in-depth, comparative study of household, economy, and settlement in three micro-regions: the Mediterranean (Sicily), Central Europe (Hungary), and Northern Europe (South Scandinavia). The results are based on ten years of fieldwork in a similar method of documentation, and scientific analyses were used in each of the regional studies, making controlled comparisons possible. The new evidence demonstrates how differences in settlement organization and household economies were counterbalanced by similarities in the organized use of the landscape in an economy dominated by the herding of large flocks of sheep and cattle. The eight chapters in this book provide a new, contextualized understanding of the social and economic complexity of the Bronze Age. Its innovative theoretical and methodological approaches will be of relevance to all researchers of landscape and settlement history.

Timothy Earle is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. His scholarship focuses on the emergence of chiefdoms, and he has conducted field research in Hawaii, the Andes, Denmark, and Hungary. He is the author of several books, most recently Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, How Chiefs Come to Power, and Bronze Age Economics. Kristian Kristiansen is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg. He is an honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the European Association of Archaeologists, which awarded him the European Archaeological Heritage Prize in 2005. He is the author of Europe before History, Social Transformations in Archaeology (with Michael Rowlands), and The Rise of Bronze Age Society (with Thomas B. Larsson), which was awarded best scholary book in 2007 by the Society for American Archaeology.