From memory to monument:
the construction of time in the Bronze Age
Kristian Kristiansen
Life cycles, rituals and tradition
During the Bronze Age time was upheld and per-
sonified by the story of the journey of the sun (Kaul
2004: Figure 67; Kristiansen, Larsson 2005: Figure
139), social and heroic time by the external origin
of chiefly lineages linked to travels and ­alliance net-
works, cosmological time by the myths of the origin
of gods and the creation and termination of the uni-
verse. Thus there existed a cosmological calendar
of ritual events that served as a blueprint for action.
Several researchers have pointed to the complex
mathematical and astronomic knowledge needed
to create the elaborate sun discs and other ritual
objects such as shields with their regular patterns
displaying the calendar year (May, Zumpe 20003;
Guillemin et al. 2003; Randsborg 2006: chapter X).
It testifies to the importance of knowing the correct
dates of important solar events, such as midsum-
mer and midwinter. Therefore we must envisage
that such knowledge was maintained and trans-
mitted by priests (in later texts named Druids and
Brahmins), and that it was constantly reproduced
through ritual performance and social actions of
individuals, whether priests, warriors, craftspeople
or travellers.
In this way individuals could inscribe them-
selves into heroic and later cosmological time or
history by earning fame in their own lifetime through
accepted mechanisms of social action (Miller 2000).
Such symbolic capital of heroic action could – if
successful – be transformed into more permanent
LEHOËRFF (A.) dir. — Construire le temps. Histoire et méthodes des chronologies et calendriers des derniers millénaires avant notre ère en Europe occidentale.
Actes du XXXe colloque international de Halma-Ipel, UMR 8164 (CNRS, Lille 3, MCC), 7-9 décembre 2006, Lille. Glux-en-Glenne : Bibracte, 2008, p. 41-50
(Bibracte ; 16).
ritual capital, materialised in monuments of ­various
kinds and transmitted to the next generation.
Heroic deeds and their ritual materialisation were
thus combined in individual ‘carrier strategies’ as it
were, to achieve power and fame not only for one
self but also for ones lineage. In this way power was
constantly negotiated. It is some of these mecha-
nisms of agency and the transformation of time and
prestige I wish to describe in this chapter, in order
to illuminate how small scale changes and frictions
during the lifetime of individuals, households and
lineages had the potential to create changes in long
term traditions, apparently without changing these
very same traditions fundamentally. It is an inherent
ingredient in the consistency of long-term or ‘great
traditions’ that they are able to accumulate and
‘digest’ change within their institutional and cos-
mological framework (Kristiansen, Larsson 2005:
chapter 6.8; Odner 2000; Rowlands 2003). I will also
explore and discuss the nature and the range of this
adaptive capacity of long-term traditions. In this way
I hope to illuminate how different time scales are
historically constructed during a period of more
than 1000 years, and how they balance each other
until a critical threshold is finally being reached
around 500 BC.
Biographies of people and things:
the warrior life cycle
During the Bronze Age individuals constructed
social identity through material objects, which were
 Kristian Kristiansen
1. The warrior and his sword, interconnected and separate life
cycles.
used in social action and ritual performance. The
warrior and his sword will serve to illustrate this dia-
lectic between objects and people in the formation
of personhood and agency (ill. 1).
What is a sword without a warrior, and what is a
warrior without a sword? They constitute each other,
and although this may seem obvious they do so in
ways much more intricate and personal than can
be deduced by pure social and technological logic.
Their biographies constitute each other and can be
read from the accumulating bodily changes to the
warrior throughout his lifecycle and from the mate-
rial changes to the sword in the same process. Thus
archaeology is in a position to read and re-tell the
biographies of multiple generations of anonymous
warriors, by studying the use wear, damages and
repairs on the thousands of well preserved swords
from the Bronze Age, and in conditions of skeletal
preservation also to study the bodily damage and
use wear to the warriors themselves (Harding 2007;
Kristiansen 1984; 2002; Molloy 2007; Sofaer 2006).
To exemplify the body language of a high-ranking
warrior we may choose the shaft grave from Aegina
of late Middle Helladic Age. Here a male warrior
in his mid twenties was buried with his wepaons:
sword and daggers (Manolis, Neuroutsis 1997). He
belonged to an exclusive group of robust and tall
warriors also found in the shaft graves at Mycenae
and he already exhibited two healed injuries on his
bones: on the condyle of the right femur and on
the left femur in the bony part between the neck
42
of the head and the greater trochanter. There were
further vigorous muscular insertions on the right
arm, resulting in bony alterations, most likely from
extensive use of his right swords arm in training and
combat. In this he resembles the warrior chiefs in
the shaft graves who also showed scars and injuries
from combat. Thus, Bronze Age weapons, especially
the sword, represent the emergence of a system of
martial arts that defined the warrior as an institution.
It included rules of etiquette and of behaviour, from
training programmes and the conduct of combat to
the rituals of the dead warrior and his weapons.
Swords would achieve fame through individual
actions of the warrior, but they could also take on a
biography of their own that superseded that of the
warrior, they would become bestowed with mytho­
logical power and agency, would be named and
honoured, as we know it from sagas and mytholo-
gies from Ireland to Greece. Such famous swords
could be deposited in a special place, such as the
famous ‘Skraep,’ which was dug up when the Danes
were in need, and given to the young prince Uffe,
who used it successfully in dual combat against the
Saxons, and thus saved his kingdom. In this way an
old worn sword could become more valuable and
powerful than a newly cast sword. However, from
the burials evidence it seems clear that during the
Bronze Age newly cast swords were in the majority
in the rich burials. It raises the question if there were
differences between swords in graves and hoards.
There are two ways to bury a sword – it may be
given as a gift to the gods (hoarding) or it may fol-
low the deceased in the grave (grave goods). This
represents two different situations of social and
ritual action within the cycle of raids and combat:
death of the warrior or chief versus defeat or vic-
tory in combat, perhaps without death. In the first
instance the whole ritual of heroic burial is mobi-
lised and in the second instance the ritual of gifts to
the gods. In both cases tales of heroic deeds would
accompany the deceased, but the sword could
always be retrieved, it remained a physical real-
ity to be reckoned with. This duality of deposition
characterise the whole Bronze Age, in some periods
and regions hoarding takes precedence, and other
deposition in burials. It testifies to a landscape
of ritualised memory, where natural sanctuaries
for hoarding were just as important as the visible
­burial monuments.These two practices were part of
a strategy to ‘keep while giving’, to use the termino­
logy of Weiner (1992).The deposited prestige goods
(giving) would remain in the landscape (keeping)
and retain their power, and thus also empower its
 From memory to monument: the construction of time in the Bronze Age
chiefly lineage. This is the Bronze Age way of ‘giving
while keeping’, and ultimately the objects and their
power could be retrieved, whether by an enemy to
destroy it, or in bad times when needed to defend
the lineage.
Observations on the sword blades recurrently
testify that swords in hoards are deposited without
repairs of scars from combat, whereas swords in
graves are normally repaired and re-sharpened.
Thus, they refer back to different situations – one
of combat and one of death. However, they entered
the same divine realm and thus were part of an
ongoing dialogue and exchange of powers between
gods and mortals, living and dead (ancestors). In
this way gods and ancestors were active agents
in the landscape and in the lives of their lineages.
They were linked by heroic tales of ancestors, of
the social genealogies in the barrows and ritual
sanctuaries, just as ritual performance by chiefly
priests disguised as gods upheld time and cosmos.
2. Unused and heavily sharpened dagger from
Hungary, They are identical, except that all
decoration is gone on the heavily resharpend
piece.
3. Beautiful full-hilted sword from the Late
Bronze Age in Hungary with a once decorated
hilt that is worn away through long time use.
I shall now proceed to describe the dynamics of
heroic and ritual actions in Bronze Age society, the
way they balanced and at times challenged each
other (ill. 2; ill. 3).
Chiefly warriors and ritual chiefs:
tensions and competition
Having studied several hundred swords from
northern and central Europe it is now clear that
there existed a universal divide throughout the
Bronze Age between full-hilted decorated swords
and more plain often flange hilted swords. While
full-hilted swords show regional distributions,
especially in the Nordic realm, warrior swords are
international with a European wide distribution.The
latter display razor sharp edges and most swords
demonstrate resharpening of scars and damages
from combat. On around one third this has changed
the original shape of the blade and levelled out pro-
43
 Kristian Kristiansen
4a. Two distribution patter of different swords types during Period 2. Nordic full-hilted swords of ritual chiefs.
liferation, these are swords with a long and bloody
biography. In contrast most full-hilted swords, always
decorated, do not display much resharpening of
edge damage, and a good deal have not sharp edges
at all (Kristiansen 1984). However, their hilt is often
worn, sometimes so heavily that most decoration is
gone. They possessed a long biography as well, but
one of a different kind than the warrior swords. We
can thus demonstrate that different sword types are
meaningfully linked to different institutions of lead-
ership in Bronze Age Europe, which was dominated
by dual leadership between ritual chiefs and war-
rior chiefs, in Mycenaean Greece termed ‘Wanax’
and ‘Lavagetas’.
These differences are most clearly played out
during the Nordic period 2 from 1500-1300 BC. Here
we find many ‘model burials’ in terms of full equip-
ment. More often burials would contain only some
part of the full range of objects, and such variations
could both be personal and situational, when the
family or lineage decided to withhold a sword per-
haps in periods of bronze scarcity, as it happened
44
during period 3. Despite such variations we can still
quite easily distinguish ritual chiefs from warriors.
The symbolism of the sun is represented by the
exclusive use of spiral decoration, which belonged
only to the ritual chiefs and their lineage, which
also included aspiring junior ranks. Its derivation
from Mycenaean culture signalled a claim to
distant origins of high culture. But other symbolism
speaks of their role and links to the divine realm.
Most important is the ship and the horse, both
attributes of the heavenly or ‘Divine Twins of early
Indo-European mythology, in later Greek mythology
named the Dioscuri (West 2007: 186ff.). Ship formed,
horse headed razors speak of this divine link just
as belt hooks are also shaped like a horse head. In
Vedic text the Divine Twins are named the ‘Asvins,’
which means the horse-born sons of the sky god;
they occupied an important intermediate position
between gods and humans, and their role could
thus be transferred to ritual chiefs. They assisted
their sister the sun goddess in her journey ­drawing
the sun chariot over the sky in the shape of two
 From memory to monument: the construction of time in the Bronze Age

4b. Two distribution patters of different swords types during Period 2. Interregional flange hilted and
octogonally hilted sword of chiefly warriors and traders.

white horses, and at dawn they rescued her from
the underworld and escorted her during the ocean
on their twin ships with horse headed stems, until
morning when they again changed from sea to sky
(Kristiansen, Larsson: Figure 139). Thus ritual chiefs
of the Nordic Bronze Age were seen as ­descendants
from the Divine Twins, carrying their symbols,
whereas the warriors normally did not display such
divine links in their burial equipment.
In this way we are able to demonstrate the
existence of an institution of ritual chiefs or chiefly
priests and of warrior chiefs or chiefly warriors, with

45
 Kristian Kristiansen
5. Model of the relationship between travelling warriors and
traders, and local power upheld by ritual chiefs. External wealth
and prestige could be transformed into local power and wealth
(large farmsteads) and a heroic burial.
distinctively different roles and rules of behaviour.
They constituted the ruling segments in Bronze Age
society. Chiefly priests would not travel long dis-
tances, but rather stay close to home to maintain
ritual supremacy and power (ill. 4a), whereas war-
riors sometimes would travel long distances as part
of those alliances that secured the flow of metal,
as well as the flow of warriors and traders (ill. 4b).
This dialectic between ritual and social power can
be seen also as a competitive relationship that
created tension and conflict. Warriors and traders
would make claims to power upon their return
from successful travels and long-distance raids
(ill. 5). However, the warrior cycle of cattle raids is
inscribed into cosmological ritual time and thus
under the domain of ritual chiefs, who would con-
trol the sacrifices. In ill. 6 I show the two time cycles:
the warrior cycle that acted as a ritualised blueprint
for raiding, and the journey of the sun, which was
controlled and supported by the ritual chiefs. In this
way ritual chiefs were in charge of the cosmologi-
cal rules of society and their rituals.
Already during period 3 from 1350/1300 to
1150 BC do we see that full-hilted swords are more
46
the celestial sovereigns
give cattle to the priestly class,
the *arya people, who sacrifice them to
who lose them to
the warrior class,
the *dāsa enemy, who recover them
who steal them in raids and
but are defeated by deliver them to
6. The ritual cycle of the cattle raid, and the eternal journey of the
sun, serving as cosmological blueprints of action and legitimacy for
warriors and ritual chiefs (after Lincoln 1981, fig. 10).
often used in combat, just as some warrior ­burials
now may contain the symbolic paraphernalia of
ritual chiefs: razor and tweeter. The warriors are
here making claims to positions previously not
open to them. The stable conditions of the ‘golden’
period 2 had come to an end after 150 years of
wealth expansion and consolidation of power for
the ruling chiefly elites. However, during Period 3,
1300-1150 BC a dramatic change took place in the
supplies of bronze, probably during the 1300 cen-
tury BC (HaA1). The old network with southern
Germany which had secured a flow of metal for
amber during most of the late 15th and 14th centuries
BC,and had provided opportunities for warriors and
traders to travel both ways (ill. 4) was cut off due to
warfare linked to social and religious reformation
throughout east central Europe. In the Carpathians
huge metal hoards containing up to one ton are
deposited, testifying to the collapse of the tradi-
tional metal distribution system, and in the west, in
south Germany, full-hilted swords of type ‘Riegsee’
and ‘Dreiwulstschwerter’ are becoming more and
more worn on the hilt, as they had to be kept longer
in circulation. These later types of full-hilted central
European swords never came to northern Europe,
due to the breakdown of the period 2 networks. It
was in the Nordic realm, however, that the unstable
supply of metal during the 13th century BC was felt
most strongly: here a whole generation of full-hilted
Nordic swords had to be kept in circulation for a
prolonged period of time. As a result their hilts were
 From memory to monument: the construction of time in the Bronze Age

7. Examples of worn down Period 3 full-hilted swords (Ksp. Harring, Harring: 4960 C [G.F.] – Hasting:
4965).

completely worn down, and the bronze was worn
away in several places laying bare the inner clay
core of the casting. They were finally deposited in
burials towards the end of Period 3,when supplies
were again becoming stable, now through political
alliances with the Carpathian region. On ill. 7 I show
examples of these completely worn down swords
that testify to their shared biographies, the result of a
temporary breakdown of the political alliances that
had secured the flow of metal to northern Europe.

47
 Kristian Kristiansen
These dramatic historical events tended to
undermine the authority of ritual chiefs, which
was linked to control over rituals and metal, that
was now becoming sparse, whereas warriors might
­benefit from taking part in raids. In this way they
could mobilise alternative wealth from raid and
plunder, whether at home or as mercenaries in
Central Europe or the Aegean, where the flange
hilted sword testifies to the appearance of warriors
from the north (Clausing 2003: Abb.2).As return pay-
ment and booty they would bring new body armour
to central Europe. (Clausing 2003: Abb.4).Thus, after
the deposition of the last generation of full-hilted
Nordic swords towards the end of period 3, we see
a major reorganisation of burials rituals. From now
on urn burials become the norm, and large objects
such as swords are no longer deposited, except in
rare circumstances. Also the construction of the
thousand of barrows made of grass turfs came to
an end, except for a few elite burials. A new politi-
cal and ritual regime with less boasting of power
had taken over, probably due to a centralisation
of power in fewer hands. It corresponds to similar
changes in central Europe (Clausing 2005), and the
elites now shared international prestige goods of
drinking and feasting (Metzner-Nebelsick 2003).
The Heroic time of the great period of mound
construction and the deposition of thousands of
costly ornaments and weapons in burials would
now be commemorated in bards tales and a new
religious mythology that could be directly linked to
the chiefly lineages of ancestors (and their deeds)
48
materialised in a barrow landscape of memory. I
thus propose that periods of cosmological origins,
the formation of new mythology and the creation
of new gods are to be located in those periods
where social transformation created a new social
and political order. The Divine Twins and their
mythology was linked to the new Bronze Age war-
riors elites and their international connections in
long-distance alliances, all made possible by new
forms of maritime transport, new forms of speedy
elite transport in chariots and consequently new
forms of warfare. All these innovations are repre-
sented in the religious functions of the Divine
Twins. Therefore they epitomize the new Bronze
Age warrior elites of the early to mid 2nd millen-
nium BC from the Urals and India to Scandinavia,
and therefore social and religious change are
intertwined, and should not be studied in isolation
(Kristiansen in press). Tensions may arise between
them, as represented by the two institutions of rit-
ual and warrior chiefs, and such tensions are the
seeds of change.
Social and ritual time cycles
and their materialisation
In conclusion I shall make an attempt to draw
together the evidence for the existence of different
time cycles and their historical meaning during
the Bronze Age. On ill. 8 I have summarised two
types of remembering, and its transformation from
Heroic deeds and ritual performance to material-
8. The construction and
reproduction of time. Two
models of the transformation
of memory: from heroic tales
to burial monument, and
from ritual performance to
rock art. Bards and priests
would uphold and transmit
the oral traditions linked to
these two arenas of social
and ritual actions.
 From memory to monument: the construction of time in the Bronze Age
ised monu­mentality of potential eternity. Individual
agency and deeds were inscribed into a ritual blue-
print for action that defined rules of etiquette and
behaviour, and as the earthly representatives of the
Divine Twins, political/ritual chiefs were in control
of their divine functions: the seasonal festivals of
the sun, the protection of travels and sea-journeys,
the initiation and protection of young warriors, the
ritual dances and music that accompanied these
ritual festivals.
In this way annual and generational time was
inscribed into the long-term cycle of heroic and
religious texts, and lifted up into eternal memory
that was materialised in ancestral barrows, rock
art and natural sanctuaries. The barrows with their
ancestors were an active power and agent that could
be mobilised in social strategies, while at the same
time they symbolised an unbroken cosmological
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