Birds in the Bronze Age

Bringing Back some Eagleness to Eagles – on Bird Worldings in the Bronze Age

“…The popular headline archaeology of aDNA springs to mind, which so far, despite solving riddle after riddle, has had very close to nothing to add to the cultural and archaeological contexts from which the data are gathered. The more we learn about the origin and spread of Haplogroup R1a or R-M420, the less we seem to care about the actual people and their peculiarities, such as, for example, their quest to take omens from birds and other other-than-human beings (Goldhahn 2019). That said, this also applies to related specialized fields of research where specialists present new studies of special rock art for other rock art specialists, settlement studies made by and for settlement specialists, and more of the same.…”

“…A way to phrase this is to say that if we want to say something new and exciting about the past, in general, we ought to try to assemble our source material and data in new and more exciting ways (Deleuze & Guttari 2004;Bennet 2010). This is especially true if we want to challenge our situated archaeological beings and the naturalism that constituted the foundation of our discipline and archaeological praxis (Thomas 2004;Goldhahn 2019, e.g. Viveiros de Castro 2012Descola 2013).…”

“…It might be true, as in the famous saying, that the sum is greater than the parts, but in this article, the process of assembling also involves a clear shift from studies of how humans used material culture (see Armstrong Oma and Goldhahn, this volume), to try to unfold how other-than-human beings participated in unfolding different Bronze Age worldings. Examples are different human-dog-sheep-worldings (Armstrong Oma 2018) or human-bird-worldings (Goldhahn 2019). The aim is to embrace a relational ontological study that decentres human actions in the past in a way which allows us to reveal how other-than-human beings might have contributed and intra-acted with humans in unfolding their worldings.…”

“…Taylor 2013; Pilaar Birch ed. 2018), I have gone underground, working clandestinely on a monograph about Birds in the Bronze Age; a study focusing on the intriguing relationships between humans and birds over the period 2350-530/520 BCE in today's Denmark and the southern parts of Norway and Sweden (Goldhahn 2019). This has been an enthralling experience.…”

“…2010; Ling et al 2018) have had very little, or close to nothing, to say about bird worldings in the Bronze Age. This has now started to change (Goldhahn 2019).…”