Bronze Age Identities 91We should therefore allow for some variation in the use of material culture in the
demarcation of political power. The Bronze Age examples suggest that we are dealing
with processes of establishing some form of local territorial power, which we may even
encounter in pre-state ranked societies of the chiefdom type. It all comes down to defi-
nitions, but what remains important is that already by the Bronze Age we see new forms
of ranked political power that implied some form of control over producers and the
formation of long-distance political alliances to ensure safe travels for traders, warriors,
and other groups of people.
Coping with Complexity: The Role of “Local,”
“National,” and “International” Identities
To conclude: identities in the Bronze Age were socially constructed and linked to insti-
tutions with different roles in society. What we see therefore are the dominant elite
identities, although we may assume that the cultural border of the Nordic identity was
also a language border, based on its continuation as a combined cultural and language
border during the Iron Age into historical times. Likewise, the regional tradition of the
Tumulus Culture was probably also identical with a Proto-Germanic language. Both
traditions shared the use of tumuli or barrows for local chiefly elites. However, both
during the Bronze Age and in later periods, such borders changed, expanded, or con-
tracted, and were thus subject to social and economic forces of change. In this respect,
language was a secondary product of social and political processes, and probably used in
much the same way as material culture to demarcate and express a dominant identity or
ethnic tradition.
Inside the regional traditions, we find politically constructed ethnic identities, cor-
responding to local polities such as chiefdoms and petty kingdoms. Parallel with this,
there existed international warrior identities or sodalities that allowed warriors to travel
and trade. Also, a new maritime economic sector defined itself ritually as a separate
social and economic institution. However, these new institutionalized sectors of travels
and trade were dependent on the maintenance of stable political alliances between local
kingdoms/chiefdoms, and we saw how these were, among other things, forged through
marriage relations, documented by “foreign wives.” Compared to the number of male
burials with international “foreign” swords, the number of “foreign” female objects is in
the minority. It suggests that we are dealing with a complex system of social exchanges,
where males more often than women would take service at foreign chiefly courts, an
interpretation now also supported by recent strontium isotope analyses (Wahl and Price
2013). We may here see the social mechanisms operating behind “stranger kings,” a
concept introduced by Marshall Sahlins some 40 years ago, which he revived in a recent
conference paper (Sahlins 2010). Here, the foreign “warrior prince” either marries the
local princess or the widow queen, eventually after killing the king. It would also cor-
respond with recent interpretations of Greek and Hittite kingship (Finkelberg 2005).
Here was an additional career strategy, which also corresponds well with the notion of
the power of foreign relations and prestige goods as a motor in the rise and expansion of
Bronze Age societies (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005).