Synopses & Reviews
A reconstruction of society in prehistoric Scandinavia, which integrates archaeology and anthropology.
Review
"It remains the virtue of the book that it so consistently and successfully integrates the social and symbolic and demonstrates how social and cosmological changes are related, defining an increasingly competitive and complex order of social reproduction that integrates the past and the present through complex rituals and through a ritualization of landscape....The book is a must for archaeologists and a welcome inspiration for an anthropology of material culture." Kristian Kristiansen, American Anthropologist
Synopsis
From prehistoric landscapes to the symbolic significance of axes and pots, this study integrates a wide range of evidence to recreate the lives of the final hunter-gatherer-fishers and first farmers in Sweden and Denmark over a period of 3,000 years.
Table of Contents
Part I. The Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic: 1. The original affluent society; 2. Axes, pots and monuments; Part II. Stone Monuments and Society in the Middle Neolithic: 3. Monument construction and social competition; 4. Settlement, tomb and landscape; 5. Death and body symbolism; 6. The social lives of artifacts; 7. Neolithic politics and a religion of the body; 8. Epilogue: working with metaphors.