92 Kristian Kristiansen
The European Bronze Age thus demonstrates how social and economic complexity
was materially and ritually defined by separate institution with separate identities that
allowed Bronze Age societies to interact and trade in a regular and systematic way, even
while maintaining more closed cultural and, probably, language identities linked to a
cosmological identity. These societies were highly complex, with a capacity to maintain
parallel, coexisting forms of identity, some linked to a larger “foreign” political world, and
some linked to a more ethnic and ritual world of “national” identity. We must envisage
these institutionalized identities as interchangeable according to a set of social rules—a
career strategy might see young warriors travel south and earn fame, and upon their
return later in life become ritual chiefs, or marry into the local foreign court. In this
complexity of identities, the Bronze Age is not vastly different from what we know from
slightly later periods, such as Archaic Greece, which exhibits similar developed forms of
identity and ethnicity, also reflected in written sources (Hall 1997, 2002; Renfrew 1998;
Finkelberg 2005). Although the jury is still out as to the existence of larger, shared ethnic
identities in the past, our example suggests that, by the Bronze Age, we see the emer-
gence of new forms of more bounded ethnic commonalities. They were based upon
a shared cosmology and shared institutions, which would in all probability also imply
some measure of a shared language. However, we must assume that many people, and
most surely the travelling warriors, were bilingual and even multilingual. These regional
identities span distances from 500 to 1,000km. Within these regional identities, we find
smaller polities 100–150km across, most probably also with ethnic names, as in the Iron
Age. There is a further lesson from this analysis: a representative archaeological database
informs us more precisely and objectively than written sources about processes of iden-
tity formation based on the political power of institutions through the construction of
symbolic fields of identity.
The Bronze Age thus exemplifies a sophisticated, institutionalized solution to a com-
plex world of metal production and distribution that integrated all local communities
in a globalized economy. In Figure 6.3, I present a scalar model of this complexity of
identities. However, to fully understand and evaluate the historical implications of these
results from the Bronze Age, we need to put them into comparative perspective. Right
now, a panorama of such studies is emerging, some even as this chapter is being writ-
ten (Fernandez Götz and Zapatero 2011; Hornborg and Hill 2011; Cifani and Stoddart
2012). While covering different historical epochs and areas, they suggest that some of my
observations from Bronze Age Europe may form part of larger historical–evolutionary
regularities in the way societies use identity formation to support the rise, consolidation,
and decline of dominant social groups and even larger social formations. In my case stud-
ies, I have mainly covered periods of more stable social formations, and it can therefore
be expected that the picture may look different in periods of change. Here, experimen-
tation and hybridity may rather be the norm. Migrations represent yet another variation
of movable identities that I have not covered here. However, to understand periods of
transition and change, we must first be able to characterize and explain the materiality
of identities and their corresponding institutions through stable periods that provide the
necessary regularity in the material record. This article is a small contribution toward
such an objective.