Bronze Age Identities 89could carry bulk goods, such as metal (Rowlands and Ling 2013). However, inside such
larger regional identities (Nordic or Greek), we can often identify the contours of smaller
polities/chiefdoms, whose meaning I shall now discuss.
Polities and Local Identities: Ethnic Groups
and Political Boundaries
The nature of local groups as defined in historical texts and in the archaeological record
corresponds most closely to what, in ethnographic research by Barth (1969) and others,
are termed “ethnic groups.” They are rather localized, and they represent the limits of
political power, eventually under a single king or chief, alternating with periods of coex-
isting chiefs or confederations. The materialization of such ethnic polities can take many
forms, but is mostly constituted by an association between objects and groups of people
that represent local power.
In south-central Europe, during the period 1500–1300BC, small variations in the
material culture of female ornaments help to identify local groups and demarcate areas
under the political power or authority of leading chiefly clans (Wiegel 1992–1994;
Wels-Weyrauch 2011), much in the same way as coinage in later historic times would
assert the economic control of local kings. The fact that female ornaments served this
function suggests the importance of controlling marriage strategies inside the territory.
Also, local pottery produced by women may show similar distributions (Nebelsick 2005),
in opposition to commercially produced pottery of later periods. It is interesting to note
that, although female ornaments are used to demarcate local boundaries of polities, they
are rich in religious and cosmological symbols that were shared throughout the Bronze
Age world (Müller-Karpe 2004). Women were thus bearers of two important messages:
a shared world of Bronze Age cosmology, and a localized world of the political/ethnic
group. Their increasing visibility through bodily adornment and dress (Sørensen and
Rebay 2008) corresponds to their rising social status in burial rituals and later in hoards,
which was a global trend in the Late Bronze Age, as demonstrated by Müller-Karpe
(Müller-Karpe 1985).
We are here encountering the social processes of consolidating political power through
the exercise of control of women and their power of reproduction. It suggests that mar-
riage between endogamous clans were now predominating, while exogamous marriage
outside the territory were used to establish and maintain political alliances to allow the
flow of goods and people between polities, including warriors and traders. In this way,
new forms of revenue from trade emerged that helped to consolidate political power.
The control of women was reinforced in the subsequent period, when widow burning
often accompanied the burial of chiefly warriors with swords (Sperber 1999).
It has also been suggested that the formation of bounded political and ethnic ter-
ritories coincides with a process of early state formation, as we know from early Iron
Age proto-states or complex chiefdoms throughout south and central Europe and the
Mediterranean. Here, select forms of material culture are used to demarcate the limits
of the polity, thereby also creating an internal identity in opposition to neighboring