Maritime Encounters

The goal of the Maritime Encounters’ Ethnographic Research Project is to explore the role that traditional watercraft, secret societies, and long-distance exchange may have played in the rise of social complexity cross-culturally. Special emphasis is placed on identifying and documenting the socio-cultural processes that may have contributed to the rise of social complexity in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age.

To date, research on the following has been conducted:

• 1) The construction of moose-hide boats among the Dene of Canada,
• 2) The relationship between traditional watercraft, long distance exchange, and political consolidation among the Chumash of southern California,
• 3) The construction techniques of traditional watercraft among the Haida of Canada, and
• 4) The relationship between secret societies, long-distance exchange, and political consolidation among the Nuxalk (Bella Coola) of Canada.

Evidence of boats and boatbuilding

Maritime technology played a central role in the movement of peoples and goods along coasts and inland waterways in prehistoric times. ‘Maritime Encounters’ aim to explore;

• (1) the interactions between hunter-gatherer and farming communities in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea in the 4^th and 3^rd millennia BC,
• (2) the movement of Bell Beaker communities in the mid-3^rd millennium BC - from Iberia to the British Islands and Norway,
• (3-4) the trade networks along the Atlantic façade in connection with the copper and tin industry from c. 2000 – 800 BC.

Understanding the boats and the available technology that made these maritime interactions possible – be it in skin boats, log boats or more complex plank-built vessels – lies at the heart of this project.

The boat is often described as the most complex construction a society could produce and is at its most basic a function of available resources, boat building technologies, tools and needs.

Part of this project will involve investigating each of these aspects to better understand the role of boats and seafaring while bearing in mind the ‘needs’ that might have underpinned certain events.

For this reason, not only direct evidence of boats and boat technologies is being collated and studied but also indirect evidence such as boat depictions in rock art and other media, boat shaped objects and models, stone monuments set in the shape of vessels, ship-settings, as well inherited maritime vocabulary. Furthermore, anthropological and ethnological comparative data will be examined.

One of the main aims of the project “Maritime Encounters: a counterpoint to the dominant terrestrial narrative of European prehistory”, is to deepen knowledge concerning the development of more advanced sea craft constructions and to identify places where boats might have been built, considering both direct and indirect evidence.

In Scandinavia, direct knowledge of Neolithic and Bronze Age watercraft technology is mainly based on finds of log boats, in some cases with signs of more advanced techniques where planks have been added to the log to increase seaworthiness. At present, there are no recorded finds of well-preserved advanced, plank-built Bronze Age boats or ships from Scandinavia, just small parts of boats ¹⁴C-dated to the Late Bronze Age.

Therefore, the find of a probable plank-built boat observed in the Gullåkra bog, Southwestern Scania, Southern Sweden, found in 1840 in a turf quarry is of great interest. Placed on the boat, a bronze horn from Montelius period III (1300-1100 BC) and horse carcasses were found.

This might indicate that the boat, together with equipment and animals have been placed in the bog as a war offering, a type of find quite common from Iron Age Scandinavia, but so far not recorded from the Bronze Age.

Thus, of great interest for the project is to investigate the potential Bronze Age plank-built boat from Gullåkra. The site has not yet been investigated, but field work including metal detection surveys and ground penetrating radar will be instigated in 2022, followed by further investigations also encompassing coring to locate and explore the find.

Travel across water, from short displacements near or along the shore to longer open ocean passages, is a central aspect of maritime existence. No matter the setting, moving people, goods, and information over the sea is very distinct from doing so over land and presents its own particular set of risks, social and technological requirements.

Maritime Encounter’s ocean voyaging simulation component aims at developing and adopting state-of-the-art vessel displacement agent-based models (ABM) to provide quantitative estimates of the effort and risk associated with ocean travel during Western Europe’s Bronze Age.

Improvements to an established ABM are being made by joining data from reconstructed vessels and naval architecture principles to generate performance and stability estimates for pertinent boat types.

Simulations will use as input past environmental conditions provided by paleogeographic and paleoclimatic reconstructions. A human body energy balance sub-model will be used to estimate traveller energy requirements.

Results from these experiments will be used to better understand the experience of travelling along routes known to have been used and to test the feasibility of trips that were plausible but for which there is no direct evidence.

The overall result will be a better understanding of the maritime connectiveness between different areas of Western Europe’s Bronze Age and how this changed over time.

With its strongly multidisciplinary team, Maritime Encounters will be able to cast new light on the long-standing enigma of the ‘Indo-European Dark Ages’. This intriguing phrase calls out the fact that there is today a large degree of consensus about when, where and in what archaeological and genetic contexts the Post-Anatolian Indo-European was situated—about 5000 years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, amongst the Yamnaya pastoralists, carrying the genetic ‘steppe cluster’.

But there is much less certainty about where the subsequent linguistic evolution took place that led to the attested Indo-European languages in their historical homelands. This is especially so for the Indo-European languages of the North and West—Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic.

With in-depth and detailed studies of post-Proto-Indo-European innovations found among these languages, Maritime Encounters’ research program seeks to illuminate developments belonging to the chronological gap corresponding to the Bronze Age and shift the focus from the grasslands of inner Eurasia to lands of Indo-European expansion on the continent’s north-western maritime regions.

Special focus areas will include Celto-Germanic and North-west Indo-European vocabulary relating to the maritime sphere, warfare, metals and mining, horses and wheeled vehicles, mythology and the supernatural, rising social complexity (gradations of free and unfree), words relatable to rock-art iconography and non-Indo-European words borrowed from indigenous peoples of maritime Northwest Europe.  

The component of the Maritime Encounters research project concerned with trade in metals is rooted in the previous projects of the University of Gothenburg, that indicated that the metals used in Scandinavia in the Bronze Age were imported from several distant sources (Ling et al. 2014; 2019; Melheim et al. 2018; Earle et al. 2015, Ling and Stos-Gale 2015).

The aim of this component of the current project is to identify the trail of metals along the maritime routes from Scandinavia through the British Isles and Ireland, along the Atlantic façade to south Iberia, based on the origin of copper and tin bronze in archaeological sites along this route, in parallel with the typological developments, from the Chalcolithic Beaker period to the end of the Bronze Age (c.2600–700 BC).

This includes the introduction of copper metallurgy, associated with the spread of Beaker material, to some parts of Europe (e.g. Atlantic France, Ireland) c.2500 BC, but also some subsequent wider trade routes with the advent of tin bronze (c.2150 BC onwards) and later periods.

To achieve this, the research in this part of the project is focused on the analytical and typological study of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age metalwork in Iberia, Atlantic France, Ireland, and Britain.

A significant number of new lead isotope and chemical analyses of metal artefacts from these regions will be conducted to identify distinct maritime exchange routes from the North Sea through the English Channel to the Atlantic coast in in this period.

A particular focus of the lead isotope and chemical analyses will be on the metal artefacts and ingots from the archaeological sites bordering on the Atlantic coast. In contrast to the numerous analytical programmes of analyses of prehistoric metals from central and southern Europe, there are very few data published for Bronze Age metals from Ireland and France.