by Chris Fowler
These technological revolutions expanded the potential for long-distance mobility and interaction on a systematic basis from the beginning of the Bronze Age, and by combining sea- and land-based journeys new regions could suddenly be connected. The volume of trade expanded both the scope of commodity transport and the demands for specialists—in shipbuilding and navigating at sea, and the construction of wagons and training of horses for land transport. New specialized social groups emerged along with a new institutional framework to support them, and such specialists expanded the cognitive geographies of Bronze Age communities tenfold or more. The archaeological reconstruction of such a trade network linked by strategic marriages (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005, fig. 107) demonstrates that specific groups with specific swords, such as octagonally hilted swords and flange hilted swords, were able to move and travel long distances. This movement can now also be supported by strontium isotope analysis, such as at Neckarsulm: a cemetery of males, mainly warriors, where one third were non-local, and thus probably had travelled to take service with a foreign chief (Wahl and Price 2013).
The regular connectivity between Bronze Age communities meant that knowledge about faraway places could be obtained and controlled. Craftsmen could have been enticed by local leaders to move across great distances, and traders became new specialists that provided knowledge and organizational skills to connect distant places and their goods. Warriors became widely sought after as mercenaries in the east Mediterranean during the late Bronze Age from the fifteenth century BC onwards, as is well attested in texts and on stelae, not least in Egypt (Morkot 2007). Such proposed movement of warriors explains how new sword types would spread rapidly from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia probably within a few years (Sherratt 2003, 2009; Hughes-Brock 2005). Thus the combination of trade in metal and possibly in arms, as well as travelling traders and warrior groups and their attached specialists, created an interconnected ‘globalized’ world without historical precedent.
Comparative analysis concluded: what was new to the Bronze Age
Regional economic division of labour
Because the products every community needed or craved were located in different regions—tin in Cornwall and Galicia, copper in a variety of places, amber in the Baltic, salt in the Alps and the Carpathians—from at least the middle Bronze Age onwards, an interregional/international trade system emerged to distribute these products in large enough quantities throughout the known world to satisfy local demands far away from source areas. Because some products such as amber and tin located in northern Europe were needed in the Mediterranean, these regions would soon profit from a competitive advantage, and became rich in metal and other imported products. For the first time we see the formation of an economic division of labour between regions, which had heavy implications in the political economy and led to the formation of new social institutions and more complex and ranked societies. However, complexity and power took on new forms different from those in the palace societies and city-states in the Mediterranean that were able to control and tax a larger territory and could use writing to keep track of transactions (de-personalized control).
Decentralized complexity
Power resided in social networks that extended beyond the immediate local resource area, and was underwritten by personal bonds rather than written treaties and contracts. Participation in the metal trade and in other new forms of long-distance trade in wool/textiles and salt would have demanded the creation of political alliances linking polities together—sometimes in confederations—in order to protect traders and their products. Participation in such institutionalized networks (providing wealth finance) and the formation of institutionalized warrior groups enabled local chiefs and centrally located tells to mobilize local resources (staple finance) by controlling the distribution of metal for both subsistence and prestige goods.
New weapons and warrior institutions
To protect trade, warriors were needed, and the Bronze Age witnessed the formation of a whole new set of weapons (swords, lances, protective body armour) that for the first time led to the formation of more permanent warrior groups and retinues, which among other things is evidenced by systematic use wear on swords and lances, and trauma on skeletons (Kristiansen 1984, 2002; Harding 2007; Harrisson 2004; Horn 2013; Uckelmann and Mödlinger 2011; Vandkilde 2011). These new weapons were much more deadly and efficient than anything preceding them, and the warriors also demanded regular training to master effective swordsmanship. In short, the swords introduced a new institution of warrior elites with retinues that could be mobilized and hired as mercenaries when needed. This new panoply of weapons was to be in continued use until historical times (Kristiansen 2013), and it became an institution that could be mobilized by chiefly leaders, but which could also overthrow them.
New means of transport and new open landscapes
Participating in such expansive in trade put further demands on infrastructure. Some settlements were localized along important waterways, as in Hungary, or along important overland routes, as in Denmark (Holst and Rasmussen 2013). We also witness the formation of continuously open landscapes that allowed travel and transport to take place along structured tracks connecting settlements for hundreds of kilometres. In addition, we see the formation of a new maritime economy along the coastlines of Scandinavia with its own ritual language of rock art and cairns facing the sea (Kristiansen 2004; Ling 2008, 2012). Similar maritime economies arose along the Atlantic façade, and soon allowed maritime long-distance trade a new economic role (Needham 2009; Rowlands and Ling 2013).
External and internal sources of power from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age
During the Neolithic we see complex societies emerge, and in some areas large populations in tell-like settlements. Their internal organization was complex and based upon an organized and regulated use of the landscape and its resources in a staple finance system supporting territorial chiefdoms. Some of these were obviously complex but could not be sustained in a temperate environment. Regional economic and cultural borders also confined the distribution of goods. There were initial attempts during the Copper Age to develop a metal-based, international economy, which failed. It would seem that the Neolithic economy remained Neolithic precisely because it could not break out of its localized regional economies, grounded in staple finance, and therefore in the long run became vulnerable to overpopulation and degradation of the local resource base, leading to collapse and migrations. During the Bronze Age an interregional metal economy developed that stimulated other forms of interregional trade and travel, thus allowing for more leeway in growth and decline as people moved between local and regional polities. Power now resided primarily in the trade economy of decentralized political networks, as wealth finance. Bronze Age societies were thus more vulnerable to external changes in production and demand of metal, and to internal competition and warfare over the control of trade routes. This shift in the overall balance of the political economy and the origin of power from staple finance to wealth finance (with many degrees of variation) makes it justified to characterize the Neolithic and the Bronze Age in their mature form as world historical epochs with a fundamentally different outlook and world view.
CONCLUSION
In this contribution I highlighted what I consider to be some major qualitative or structural differences between Neolithic and Bronze Age societies. The historical transformation between the two world historical epochs took place during the transition between the fourth and the third millennia BC (Hansen and Müller 2011; Hansen et al. 2010; Smith and Rubinson 2003), as it paved the way for a new type of social organization based on new notions of family, and of property and its transmission, coupled to the introduction of new metallurgical knowledge. However, it took another millennium before this new social formation unfolded its potential in Europe, which happened only when bronze became an economic foundation and thus restructured the political economy around a new set of institutions, leading to more complex socie
ties at a global level. It may be suggested that the later Neolithic/Chalcolithic mega-sites in both eastern Europe and the Iberian peninsula represented an attempt to carry on a Near Eastern evolutionary trajectory towards urbanization and state formation which failed. And part of an explanation for this failure is perhaps to be found in comparisons with the Bronze Age, when institutionalized trade networks needed to sustain larger populations in the long term developed along with a regional division of labour and resources.
A discussion about differences between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age is therefore useful, because it highlights some fundamental theoretical and interpretive issues about the nature of later European prehistory. I have criticized those who prefer to view Neolithic and Bronze Age societies as basically similar for disregarding the economic role of interaction and commodity trade during the Bronze Age, despite apparent similarities in social organization. Likewise the role of bronze weapons and of warrior retinues defined a new social institution with capacities to control and conquer on a scale unknown in the Neolithic. Thus, whilst Neolithic societies could form impressive territorial chiefdoms, they were not grounded in a global system of social institutions that enabled the systematic extraction of tribute and the command of warrior retinues, which characterized the Bronze Age. Mature Bronze Age societies from the seventeenth or sixteenth century BC onwards (Meller et al. 2013) were therefore much closer to later Iron Age societies, and on an evolutionary scale they are rather more like archaic states, or stratified societies in Morton Fried’s terminology (Fried 1967). The inability to see this structural difference between Neolithic and Bronze Age society is often based upon a typological misconception of societies as defined by a descriptive list of archaeological traits, which are then used to draw direct parallels between Neolithic and Bronze Age tell societies. What is critical is how those traits are organized (instituted) as political systems that structure social segments, in particular power arrangements. Even more critical is to understand the geographical scale of the economy, and thus the balance between wealth and staple finance. This balance changed dramatically during the Bronze Age, which accounts for the qualitative differences that separated the two historical epochs, with correspondingly different world-views and power structures as a result.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wish to thank Timothy Earle for help and inspiration in comparing Neolithic and Bronze Age tell societies. I am here drawing on our joint article (Kristiansen and Earle, in press).
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