Modelling Bronze Age societies in Southern Scandinavia

Through recent groundbreaking results on mobility, trade, and warfare, the nature of Scandinavian Bronze Age societies has become a major research subject.

While the current explanatory models often use top-down perspectives, little attention has been paid to the local or regional social and economic organization that undergirded the Nordic Bronze Age. This project will use existing big data to model local polities from the bottom up.

The main aim is to undertake a systematic, comparative regional study to model the heterogeneity of these local communities, and their interaction with each other and with European trade networks.

Studying the social dynamics between different regions in Scandinavia can make sense of local variation, contribute to a better understanding, and eventually challenge, the prevailing top-down models.

The data for this undertaking exists in national and open-access databases, published reports, catalogs, and data gained through collaboration with large analysis projects.

To model, this data well-established methods will be used that account for temporal and spatial variation, like network analysis, Ripley’s K-function, and Bayesian modelling. Our interpretation is based on a version of ‘collective-action-theory’ amended to suit the nature of our data.

With this, we can bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative approaches and are able to reconstruct how local polities interacted in southern Scandinavia and with the outside world.