Chapter 7 is an integrated case study showing how the full range of established and novel techniques have been integrated to understand the early farming economies of Central Europe, with particular focus on the LBK culture. This case study shows how such approaches are invaluable in understanding not only diet and subsistence, but also social issues of identity and inheritance.

Finds of birds from archaeological excavations of Bronze Age features, settlements, and monuments are often considered rare and precious – partly because of carbonate hydroxylapatite (bone) is unstable below pH of 7 and unstoppable site formation processes, but also because of cultural praxis and implicit and explicit research strategies. When bird bones are found, it is not evident if they should be interpreted as everyday food consumption or seasonal fowling. Often bird remains are connected to ritualized practices, and sometimes it is evident that finds should be interpreted as mnemonic devices and ritual paraphernalia that were linked to past cosmologies.2

The practice of taking directions, counsels, omens, and divinations from birds, known as ornithomanteia, has been described as one of the oldest scientific practices in the world.2 As was hinted in the previous chapter, this circumstance springs from the silent fact that many bird species and humans coevolved and share a long and interwoven cultural history. Another reason for this rests with the independent agency of avian creatures. Bird intra-acts.

Chapter 5 discusses how the study of ancient genetics has contributed specifically to our understanding economic issues through the sequencing of human, plant and animal DNA. It discusses the next generation sequencing and whole genome revolutions, the study of domestication events, migration and health, as well as some of the precautions needed to avoid pitfalls encountered in some earlier studies.

This book aimed to explore the intriguing multispecies relationship and commensal bond between human and nonhuman beings in general, human and animal relationships in particular, and especially the relationship between human and avian creatures. The scene was set to North Europe, and the time frame to the Bronze Age. It aimed to challenge the common split between different notions nourished by the modern era such as subject/matter, nature/culture, animal/human, primitive/modern, real/constructed, matter/spirit, substance/form, innate/learned, male/female, and other associated hierarchal inequalities. It turned to discourses within the anthropological field and the ontological turn evoked by researchers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Phillipe Descola, Tim Ingold, and others, who been exploring the manifolds of worldings among human cultures around the globe, such as animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. It also tried to embrace Karen Barad‘s notion of agential realist ontology and her thoughts on how different matters and nonhuman beings participate in unfolding humans understandings of the world. Together it formed agential realist perspectivism that I have tried to explore in relation to Birds in the Bronze Age.

This book sets out to explore the intriguing multispecies relationships between humans and birds and birds and humans during the Bronze Age in North Europe. I will argue that avian creatures were central to Bronze Age people and their worldings.1 However, before we begin this odyssey, let us put one thing straight, right from the beginning: I am neither a twitcher nor a birder. Some of the latter would even question that this is a book about birds. That said, I do enjoy the company of birds. As I outlined in the preface, it is some of my alluring meetings with avian creatures that persuaded me to write this book. My interest in our feathered friends is grounded in the commensal bond that exists and is exposed in human–bird relations. As well as humans showing an interest in birds and their being, birds seem to show a similar interest in human beings.

Chapter 3 deals with the stable isotope revolution and considers how isotopic approaches can best be integrated with more established forms of zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical evidence. This chapter also considers latest developments in this field and how they might further revolutionise our understanding.

In North Europe, animal depictions first appear in bronze during MBA I but do not become common until MBA II.2 Some of the earliest depictions are fish-like figures found on bronze weapons, such as the subtly decorated spearhead found in the renowned Valsømagle interment, dated to MBA I.3 Horse motifs first appeared in MBA II, and in a recent study Flemming Kaul advocated that they were introduced through long-distance contacts with the palace cultures in the eastern Mediterranean.4 Based on current evidence, horse depictions seem to appear simultaneously in the rock and bronze media. In bronze, the horse appears both as figurines and as sculptured handles on razors in MBA II. The most famous is the adorned horse figurine from the Trundholm moor from Zealand in Denmark, which appears to pull an elaborate sun disk on a string (Plate 2).

The main aim of this chapter is to discuss how the perception of landscape participated in unfolding people’s worldings in the Bronze Age. It will be informed by the previous chapters’ emphasis on different types of human and bird intra-actions, such as the importance of find context and the depiction of birds, the active role of the media in unfolding the message, and the enthralling agencies of avian creatures. In this context, it might be seen as a truism to underline that rock art perpetually engages with landscapes, though it is created on and in relation to landscapes. However, what meaning and significance can we ascribe to this relationship? Here I will argue that we can explore this grounded relationship more thoroughly through the “absence” of our everyday experience of open-air landscapes. The stage is therefore set to a number of dusky caves in central Norway.

My understanding of the Bronze Age of North Europe is that places such as Apalle or Vistad do not represent conventional settlements. Both sites belong to a growing number of local and regional centers dated to the LBA that have been uncovered during the last decades – such as Voldtofte and Kirkebjerget on Fuen in Denmark, with its specialized production of bronze lurs; Södra Kristineberg in Scania, with gold and silver crafting; and Hallunda in Södermanland and Hunn in Østfold, with specialized production of metal objects and ceramics.1 At many of these regional centers, we find archaeological traces of elaborated ritualized practices.2 On the LBA settlement at Hallunda, for example, bronze crafting took place on a conspicuous hilltop that overlooked a contemporaneous settlement. On the hilltop, some furnaces had been placed in a stone-framed cult house (Figure 42). The bronze crafting took place surrounded by dead ancestors in the form of approximately thirty preserved stone settings, each containing one or more cremation burials. Some of these burials contained exotic artifacts and rock art.3

Chapter 4 is about the organic residue analysis, both of lipids and proteins, concentrating particularly on the identification of foods and other substances absorbed into pottery vessels, but also considers dental calculus. The chapter considers the middle range theory behind reaching conclusions regarding diet from the reconstructing the past contents of a particular class of material culture.

There is nothing remotely ordinary about the MBA burial from the Hvidegård farm on Zealand in Denmark.2 The burial, situated a short distance north of today’s Copenhagen, dates from the first part of MBA III, c. 1330–1200 BCE. It was excavated under the careful supervision of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865), no less, the celebrated founder of the Three Age System.3 The burial context divulges a strange mixture of inhumation and cremation practices.4 And if that was not enough, the well-preserved grave goods encompass a number of spectacular finds that not only suggest many contacts to the European continent during the MBA, but also some truly thought-provoking paraphernalia that ought to belong to a ritual specialist.5

In previous sections of this book, we have attempted to capture various evasive and elusive avian creatures. Repeatedly we have seen how the depictions of birds have been hard to pin down, sort and categorize. Even if we attempt to lump them together into loose and vague categories such as wood fowl, waterfowl, big waders and raptors, and corvids (Table 9), we end up with more questions than answers. Each attempt to reanalyze and reclassify the ninety rock panels in the assemblage and the associated figurative world of avian creatures results in different answers, with the numbers and percentages of classes slightly different. Hopefully, we can be wiser after my own virtuous attempt to approach this assemblage, a task I found rather Sisyphean! Moreover, even the motifs that seem to be easily categorized contravene the constrained definitions that exist within naturalism. Instead, the rock art assemblage underlines change, transformation, and metamorphosis. This is most clearly exemplified by the bird figures depicted with human attributes, such as feet (Figure 10), or anthropomorphs depicted with bird attributes, such as beaks and wings (Figures 17, 58, 63, and 66). Panta rhei!