Department of Environmental Archaeology and Materials Science, The National Museum of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby (Brede), Denmark.
Archaeology Department, Museum Thy, Thisted, Denmark.
PLoS One. 2021 May 12;16(5):e0249476. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0249476. eCollection 2021.
Changes in funerary practices are key to the understanding of social transformations of past societies. Over the course of the Nordic Bronze Age, funerary practices changed from inhumation to cremation. The aim of this study is to shed light on this fundamental change through a cross-examination of archaeometric provenance data and archaeological discussions of the context and layouts of early cremation graves. To this end, we conducted 19 new provenance analyses of strontium isotopes from Early Nordic Bronze age contexts in Thisted County and Zealand and Late Bronze Age contexts from Thisted County and Vesthimmerland (Denmark). These data are subsequently compared with data from other extant relevant studies, including those from Late Bronze Age Fraugde on the Danish island of Fyn. Overall, the variations within our provenience data suggest that the integration and establishment of cremation may not have had a one-to-one relationship with in-migration to Nordic Bronze Age Denmark. Moreover, there seems to be no single blanket scenario which dictated the uptake of cremation as a practice within this part of Southern Scandinavia. By addressing habitus in relation to the deposition of cremations as juxtaposed with these provenance data¸ we hypothesize several potential pathways for the uptake of cremation as a new cultural practice within the Danish Nordic Bronze Age and suggest that this may have been a highly individual process, whose tempo may have been dictated by the specificities of the region(s) concerned.
丧葬习俗的变化是理解过去社会社会变革的关键。在北欧青铜时代，丧葬习俗从土葬变为火葬。本研究旨在通过对考古学来源数据的交叉检查以及对早期火葬墓的背景和布局的考古学讨论，揭示这一根本性变化。为此，我们对来自丹麦的泰斯特德县和西兰岛的北欧青铜时代早期和来自泰斯特德县和维斯特黑默兰的青铜时代晚期的 19 个新的锶同位素考古来源进行了分析。这些数据随后与其他现有相关研究的数据进行了比较，包括来自丹麦菲英岛的青铜时代晚期 Fraugde 的数据。总体而言，我们的来源数据中的变化表明，火葬的融合和建立可能与北欧青铜时代丹麦的移民之间没有一一对应的关系。此外，似乎没有一个单一的总体情况决定了火葬作为南斯堪的纳维亚这一地区的一种习俗被采用。通过将与这些来源数据并列的火葬埋葬与习性联系起来，我们假设在丹麦的北欧青铜时代，火葬作为一种新的文化习俗被采用的几种潜在途径，并认为这可能是一个高度个体化的过程，其节奏可能取决于所涉地区的特殊性。
