Session: #247

Theme & Session Format

Theme:
The archaeology of material culture, bodies and landscapes
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Title & Content

Title:
Gateway or Endpoint: Scandinavian Contacts from the Third to First Millennium BC
Content:
In the recent edition of "Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell you Everything You Need to Know about World Politics", Marshall equates geographical position, topography and natural resources of nations with their socio-political destinies. Although Marshall’s work is a brilliant reinvestigation of modern history and geopolitics, neither his foundation theory nor the ideas he expresses are new. Emperor Napoleon is quoted as saying that “geography is destiny” and his contemporary Metternich declared “When France sneezes, all of Europe catches cold.”
This session demands firstly whether such statements are true and, if so, to what degree they can be applied to the more distant periods of European history. Recent interdisciplinary research has shown that although Scandinavia was along the geographical periphery of Europe, it was nonetheless a transcultural and transformative centre. This session welcomes papers which address the transmission, exchange and transformation of social, economic, material or human contacts between Scandinavia and the greater European Continent. Discussions should revolve around transcultural flows which either originated or terminated in Scandinavia and which address that northern region as a nodal point.
Keywords:
Scandinavia, networks, prehistory, nodal points
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no

Organisers

Main organiser:
Doctor/Phd Samantha Reiter (Denmark) 1
Co-organisers:
Dr Heide Wrobel Nørgaard (Denmark) 2
Dr Paulina Suchowska-Ducke (Poland) 3
Affiliations:
1. The National Museum of Denmark
2. Aarhus University
3. Adan Mickiewicz University Poznan