CHAPTER 6
Bronze Age Identities
From Social to Cultural and Ethnic Identity
Kristian Kristiansen
Situating Bronze Age Identities—
The Dialectics of Social, Cultural,
and Ethnic Identities
In this chapter, I wish to propose that, by the Bronze Age, we see, for the first time in
European history, the formation of larger cultural and—perhaps—ethnic traditions that
were to remain a distinctive feature of later history (See Figure 6.1). In this, the Bronze
Age presents itself as a historical epoch with a distinctive identity of its own, part of which
was carried on in later history. We can illuminate this distinctiveness by contrasting it with
the preceding Neolithic period, which is characterized by a plethora of different cultural
and ethnic traditions. By the Bronze Age, however, they are replaced by the formation
of larger cultural traditions, such as Nordic, Atlantic, and Tumulus, which by the Iron
Age can be shown also to correspond to language groups, such as Norse, Celtic and
Germanic, again subdivided into regional groups. These larger regional cultural tradi-
tions also distinguished themselves by differences in house architecture and domestic life.
The Atlantic tradition held to circular houses and farmsteads, the Nordic to three-aisled
longhouses of individual farmsteads spread in the landscape, whereas the east-central
European tradition was organized in fortified tell settlements comprising larger groups
of people. These traditions were thus based on a distinct organization of landscapes,
including land divisions and roads. All settlements throughout Europe, though, were
nodal points in open, connected landscapes that facilitated travel and trade also over land.
These open, organized landscapes and their corresponding traditions emerged with the
mature Bronze Age.
Inside these larger cultural traditions, we can also identify smaller local, political con-
figurations in the archaeological record. Thus, by the Bronze Age, we are presented with
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.