Bronze haunts students of the northern Bronze Age periphery – too much to ignore, too little to make much sense of. Might there not be advantages in studying the end of the Bronze Age world? Might not the rarity of bronze, the unforgiving topography and harsh seas provide the northern periphery with an edge, methodologically speaking?

I believe they do, but in order to embrace these opportunities we need to re-evaluate our strategies, procedures and perspectives. Those that we have are focused on broad patterns, large quantities and long time spans, and they make use of hazardous shortcuts from these patterns to society. We need strategies and perspectives that deal with the few, the extraordinary and the short term – a particularistic methodology. That the long-term is an asset in itself, exclusive to the discipline of archaeology, is an illusion. Only through studying situational and shorter rhythms of time will archaeology be able to build bridges and tap into the insights of cognitive psychology, social anthropology, sociology and history. Only through meticulous explorations of this byway will we be able to fulfil the ultimate aim of archaeology as the study of humanity in the long term.

Transformation and displacement

Bruno Latour has criticized the social sciences for using “social” and “social structure” as if they were concrete materials in order to account for other states of affairs.