Nordic Bronze Age

The Nordic Bronze Age is the period of Scandinavian prehistory between roughly 1750 and 500 BCE, when the peoples of southern Scandinavia and northern Germany built a rich bronze-using culture without local sources of copper or tin. Trading amber for imported metal, they became skilled metalworkers and left more bronze and gold, by number and density of finds, than any other European region of the time.

The culture grew out of the Late Neolithic Dagger period, rooted in the Corded Ware traditions of the region, the Battle Axe culture in Sweden and Norway and the Single Grave culture in Denmark and northern Germany, together with the Bell Beaker culture. Strong influence from Central Europe, from people akin to the Únětice culture, brought new customs and, above all, metallurgy. Bronze tools appeared shortly after 2000 BCE, and bronze-working was adopted more systematically from about 1750 BCE. The archaeologist Oscar Montelius, who coined the term, divided the period into six phases in 1885. His sequence still stands, though radiocarbon dating places its start nearer 1700 BCE than the 1800 BCE he proposed.

Most people lived on single farmsteads, each with a longhouse; a few halls reached 50 metres in length and are thought to have belonged to chiefs. Farmers grew wheat, millet and barley and kept cattle, sheep and pigs, and also fished and hunted. One estimate puts the population of Scandinavia at about 300,000 to 500,000. The dead were buried under mounds, at least 50,000 of them in Denmark alone between 1500 and 1150 BCE, some of them very rich, such as the Kivik King's Grave in Sweden. Oak-coffin burials of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE, including that of the Egtved Girl, preserved clothing in remarkable condition. In the Late Bronze Age cremation and urn burial gradually replaced burial of the body.

All bronze and gold had to be imported, from Central Europe and as far as Sardinia, Iberia and Cyprus, but objects were usually made locally, using the lost-wax method. In the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE southern Scandinavia placed more elaborate bronzes in its graves and hoards than any other part of Europe. In return the north exported amber along the Amber Road; Baltic amber reached the shaft graves of Mycenae. The archaeologists Kristiansen and Larsson argue that the culture after 1500 BCE drew consciously on a Mycenaean model, and southern Scandinavia shared with Greece similar swords, campstools, razors and other elements of an elite lifestyle.

Weapons were central to status: more than 70 per cent of burials contain metal objects, most often swords and daggers. Studies suggest violence within communities was relatively rare, and that warfare was directed outwards, along trade routes. Rock carvings show many ships manned by armed crews. Ancient DNA shows that people from the Nordic sphere fought in the thirteenth-century BCE battle in the Tollense valley in northern Germany, around the time the Late Bronze Age collapse began in the Mediterranean.

No written sources describe the religion, but carvings and offerings point to a central role for the sun, imagined as travelling by chariot or boat. Bohuslän on Sweden's west coast holds about 1,500 recorded carving sites, at Tanum and elsewhere, depicting ships, weapons, people, animals and ploughs.

Iron was being worked in Scandinavia by at least the ninth century BCE. Around the fifth century BCE the Jastorf culture and the Pre-Roman Iron Age took over from the Nordic Bronze Age, which is often regarded as ancestral to the Germanic peoples. During its later phases, contacts with the Urnfield cultures of Central Europe and with Italy intensified.

Our 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE maps draw this culture under the label "N. European Bronze Age cultures". The shape reaches well beyond the Nordic core of Denmark, southern Sweden and northern Germany, across the Baltic lands into western Russia, and should be read as a broad, approximate zone.