militarizing and its entry into the Bronze Age. In Neolithic Scandinavia boats were
small, and were either made of skin or were dug out from logs.^104 This primitive
tradition persisted into the second millennium BC, but with the Nordic Bronze
Age came a much more seaworthy craft: the long ship made from planks and
rowed by lines of men seated abreast. How important the long ship was in the
Nordic Bronze Age is shown by its prevalence in rock carvings in Norway, in
Denmark and especially in the Bohuslän and Östergötland provinces of southern
Sweden. The long ship was also a favorite decorative motif on bronze objects,
and these have been especially helpful for establishing a chronology (some 800
ship images have been found on some 400 bronze objects from the Nordic Bronze
Age, most of the objects coming from graves).^105
Until recently the ship images did not attract much attention, but this is
changing, thanks in part to work done by Johan Ling. Ling’s 2008 dissertation
at the University of Gothenburg has now been published asElevated Rock Art:
Towards a Maritime Understanding of Rock Art in Northern Bohuslän, Sweden.^106
Ling’s starting point is the consensus among geologists that the land in southern
Scandinavia has been slowly elevating since the end of the Ice Age, and that
the uplifting of the land has exposed much of the coastal landscape that 4000
years ago was still under water. Ling attempts to understand the rock art of Bohus
län within the context of the Bronze Age landscape/seascape, and also to show
that the varying locations of the rock carvings reflect the progressive retreat of
the sea from the rock (thus allowing him to reconstruct a probable chronology for
the carvings). The rock art has traditionally been seen as carved by farmers and
pastoralists in their idle hours, but when the carvings were made most of them
were visible from the sea and some were visible only from the sea.
Since the BA, however, the landscape has been transformed by shore dis -
placement, so today most of the rock art, on bedrock of granite or gneiss, is
located around 10 km inland. The most common figurative image is the ship;
the region is known to contain some 10,000 ship images.^107Ling places the earliest of the ship images at the end of the Ia and the beginning
of the Ib period of the Nordic Bronze Age, or shortly before 1500 BCon the
historical chronology.
The maritime tradition of the Nordic Bronze Age was apparently initiated by
contact with the eastern Mediterranean cultures, and it is very likely that the amber
trade lay behind the extension of the Mediterranean maritime tradition to Scan -
dinavia. Before amber was carried over a land route through central Europe, that
is, it seems to have been brought to Greece by ships: from the North Sea through
the English Channel, around Gibraltar, and then through the Mediter ranean.^108
Kristiansen and Larsson pointed out that in Bronze Age Scandinavia and in
Mycenaean Greece there were not only “shared traditions in picturing ships
during 1700–1400 BC,”^109 but also similarities in the way that ships were designed
and built:
Militarism in temperate Europe 159