Bronze Age Identities 85Two general observations may serve to explain the formation of larger and more com-
plex forms of cultural traditions in the Bronze Age:
- The distribution of metal from a few source areas to all European societies demanded
new forms of long-distance interaction that were both more regular and frequent
than in the Neolithic period. - This led to technological innovations in transport, most notably in the maritime sector
where new seagoing ships enabled long-distance maritime trade.
A new, globalized world of interconnectivity took shape, and, as a result, new forms of
regional identities appeared, as well as new forms of interregional identities (for a compar-
ative case, see Hornborg 2005). These new regional identities were very much linked to
specific social institutions with a cosmological or religious symbolic language. They estab-
lished clear-cut borders to other regional traditions (Kristiansen 1998, Figure 40), but
at the same time new forms of interregional identities that served to keep the metal flow-
ing crosscut such regional traditions. Bronze Age identities were thus evolving around a
dialectic relationship between cultural closure and openness, much as in our own glob-
alized world of today.
What we observe here is the historical emergence of the dialectic processes of “global-
ization” and identity formation, which reached their historical climax during the expan-
sion of capitalism and the formation of a modern world system with the resurgence
of identity formation, now labeled “nationalism” (see Hall, Chapter 4 in this volume).
Cultural identities and ethnicities are always formed in relation to and sometimes in oppo-
sition to other such identities (Barth 1969; Sahlins 2010). From this arises the theoretical
paradox that, while cultures are seemingly autonomous and often studied as such, they
are derived from larger “global” processes of interlinked political economies, which fuel a
process of identification with certain cultural and cosmological values and material expres-
sions. They are part of a process of elite formation and elite control in need of boundaries
to exert its control by establishing a system of shared values. Over time, cultural identity
may come to include other forms of identification; for example, language may lend to it a
certain degree of relative autonomy. While nationalism may have taken on more sophis-
ticated and penetrating means of identity formation during the late modern period, it is
shaped by the very same processes that led to the emergence of new regional identities
in the Bronze Age. They need therefore to be studied with due respect to these larger
historical processes.
We begin by specifying these new forms of identity in the Bronze Age, and then dis-
cuss their meaning. From a methodological point of view, boundary formation of various
forms can often be demonstrated in the archaeological record, which defines “us” and
“them” (Hodder 1982). We may assume that complex societies produced more bound-
aries than less complex societies, internal as well as external. The definition of such
boundaries in the archaeological record, however, is only a first step. Next follows the
theoretical interpretation of the social and economic processes leading to such divisions
in the material record. If they carry any weight, it must be possible to link them to the
formation and reproduction of institutions. While ethnicity undoubtedly played a central
role in all human societies, arising from traditions of common origin and shared histori-
cal identity (Jones 1997), its material expressions have been an underdeveloped field of