Recycling Ideas: Bronze Age Metal Production in Southern Norway

Initially, the aim of this study was to examine technological, cognitive and symbolic aspects of metallurgy in southern Norway in the Bronze Age, i.e. 1700-500 cal. BC. To contextualize and understand the Norwegian data material, the scope was soon widened geographically as well as chronologically. As a result, evidence from the whole Nordic region has been considered and the time frame extended to the beginning of the Late Neolithic, i.e. c. 2400 cal. BC. In unexpected ways, the investigation ended up as an exploration of ideas, ideas belonging to the present as well as ideas belonging to the past. Basically, two sets of ideas are scrutinized: 1) ideas that have governed and still govern archaeological concepts of the Bronze Age, and 2) ideas that moulded Bronze Age mentality, arising, it is argued, from physical experience with metallurgy. In keeping with this, the 'webs of significance' - a phrase borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1973) - are to be understood as, on the one hand, the changing scientific discourses within which current archaeological ideas about Bronze Age metallurgy have evolved, and on the other, the prehistoric contexts and relations which gave meaning to metallurgy in the Bronze Age.