An abundance and diverse range of prehistoric fishing practices was revealed during excavations between 2012 and 2022 at the construction site of the Femern Belt Tunnel, linking the islands of Lolland (Denmark) and Femern (Germany). The waterlogged parts of the prehistoric Syltholm Fjord yielded well preserved organic materials, including the remains of wooden fish traps and weirs, and numerous vertical stakes and posts driven into the former seabed – evidence of long term fishing practices using stationary wooden structures from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age (c. 4700–900 cal BC). Here, we present the results of a detailed study on these stationary wooden fishing structures, making this the most comprehensive and detailed description of prehistoric passive fishing practices in Syltholm Fjord to date. The exceptional scale of the excavated area (57 ha) and abundance of organic materials encountered during excavations provides us with a rare opportunity to identify individual weir systems and information on their construction, maintenance, and use. To contextualise further, we provide an up-to-date compilation of comparable finds in the Danish archaeological record, including a dataset of directly dated specimens, based on both published and unpublished sources. Our results show that stationary wooden fishing structures are an invaluable archaeological resource, and their study, combining landscape reconstruction, ethnographic analogy, and fishing technology, together with artefactual evidence and radiocarbon dating, allows us to reconstruct prehistoric fishing strategies in depth. Due to the long chronology and diversity of the study materials, our results complement previous research on the many nuances and regional specificities of the persistence of fishing practices in the western Baltic Sea over time, despite introductions of new cultures, populations, and livelihoods. Finally, we emphasise that the Neolithisation process in Northern Europe was not as straightforward and uniform in terms of subsistence as commonly assumed.

When and how do party politics matter in junior allies’ decisions to engage in multinational military operations? Developing a new role theory model of party politics and multinational military operations, we put forward a two-level argument. First, we argue that the rationale for military action is defined in a contest between political parties with expectations of what constitutes the proper purpose (constitutive roles) and functions (functional roles) of the state. Second, we hold that material and ontological insecurities reduce political space for contestation and debate, but that junior allies tend to focus on role demands for ‘good states’ and ‘good allies’ rather than the nature and aim of the military operation. To unpack our argument, we analyse the debate among political parties in Romania and Denmark leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Concluding our analysis, we outline the implications for the changing security order and current debates in NATO member states on how to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This article reconstructs and analyses the conceptual history of “the people” [Folket] in modern Danish history. It applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze new data and archival materials and provides a detailed study of the construction, development and central role of populist conceptions of “the people” in the constitutional struggles between 1830 and 1920 that transformed Denmark from an absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy. I argue that these populist conceptualizations of “the people” shaped and fostered the emergence of the ideas and practices of parliamentary democracy as “the people’s rule” [Folkestyre]. This case study thereby challenges contemporary assumptions about an inherently adversarial relationship between populism and democracy. Moreover, it makes a number of empirical and analytical contributions to the existing historiography, as well as the literature on the construction of “the people,” democracy and populism.

During the third millennium BC, new types of anthropogenic landscape emerged across northern Europe: heathlands and pasture. These open landscapes afforded mobile pastoralism and the arena for a new funerary practice: barrow building. Here, the authors define this entanglement of people, animals and landscapes as a literal and figurative ‘ancestral commons’. Focusing on western Jutland, they combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to characterise the form and temporal depth of the co-emergent links between pastoralism, barrows and mobility. Conceptualising the ancestral commons as a deep-time entanglement, characterised by rhythms of physical and metaphorical movement, reveals a landscape that afforded shared understanding of the ancestral past and a foundation for the subsequent Nordic Bronze Age.

Health systems internationally face demands to deliver care that is better coordinated and integrated. The health system financing and delivery model may go some, but not all the way in explaining health system fragmentation. In this paper, we consider the road to care integration in two countries with Beveridge style health systems, England and Denmark, that are both ranked as highly Integrated systems in Toth's health integration index. We use the SELFIE framework to compare the policies and reforms that have affected care integration over the past 30 years in the two countries. The countries both started their reform path by reforming to introduce choice and competition, but did so in different ways that set them on different pathways. Nevertheless, after two decades, the countries ended the period with largely similar structures that emphasised the creation of a cross-sectoral governance structure. In the relatively centralised England, by introducing decentralised Integrated Care Systems, and in the relatively decentralised Denmark with a centralising element in the form of new Health Clusters.

During the tenth century AD, Harald Bluetooth ruled Denmark from the royal seat at Jelling. The two extant Jelling mounds are traditionally associated with Harald's parents, Gorm and Thyra, about whom we know little. Unusually, the name Thyra appears on both Jelling runestones and on several others from the region. If all refer to the same person, she would be commemorated on more runestones than anyone else in Viking-Age Denmark. The authors use 3D-scanning to study rune carving techniques, combined with analyses of orthography and language, concluding that the Jelling 2 and Læborg stones are linked by the hand of the carver Ravnunge-Tue. The results suggest Thyra played a pivotal role in the emergence of the Danish state.

A register-based retrospective observational study was conducted to describe SARS-CoV-2 cases and case-clusters in schoolchildren of Danish primary and lower secondary schools and identify which factors were associated with the occurrence of case-clusters in schools. The study period was the autumn school semester 2021. Clusters were defined as three or more cases in a school-class level within 14 days. Descriptive analysis was carried out and multivariable logistic regression analysis was performed to determine which factors were associated with case introductions (i.e., primary case) being linked to a cluster. More cases and clusters were identified in lower than in higher class levels. Out of 21,497 cases introduced into a school, 41.6% started a cluster. A higher assumed immunity level in a class level was significantly reducing the odds of a case introduction being linked to a cluster (e.g., assumed immunity of ≥80% vs <20%: OR: 0.28; 95%CI: 0.17–0.44). A previous infection (in the primary case) had a protective effect (OR: 0.58; 95%CI: 0.33–0.99). This study suggests that most cases appearing in schools did not induce clusters, but that once cluster occur sizes can be large. It further indicates that vaccination of children markedly reduces the risk of secondary infections.

Intermittent fever is a historical diagnosis with a contested meaning. Historians have associated it with both benign malaria and severe epidemics during the Early Modern Era and early nineteenth century. Where other older medical diagnoses perished under changing medical paradigms, intermittent fever ‘survived’ into the twentieth century. This article studies the development in how intermittent fever was framed in Denmark between 1826 and 1886 through terminology, clinical symptoms and aetiology. In the 1820s and 1830s, intermittent fever was a broad disease category, which the diagnosis ‘koldfeber’. Danish physicians were inspired by Hippocratic teachings in the early nineteenth century, and patients were seen as having unique constitutions. For that reason, intermittent fevers presented itself as both benign and severe with a broad spectrum of clinical symptoms. As the Parisian school gradually replaced humoral pathology in the mid-nineteenth century, intermittent fever and koldfeber became synonymous for one disease condition with a nosography that resembles modern malaria. The nosography of intermittent fever remained consistent throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although intermittent fever was conceptualized as caused by miasmas throughout most of the nineteenth century, the discovery of the Plasmodium parasite in 1880 led to a change in the conceptualization of what miasmas were. The article concludes that the development of how intermittent fever was framed follows the changing scientific paradigms that shaped Danish medicine in the nineteenth century.

In this article, I take up the case of runic writing to reflect upon James Scott’s view of the nexus between writing and various forms of domination in early states, especially the use of literacy for taxation in cereal-growing societies. Scott’s theses provide interesting matter “to think with,” even when his grasp of historical detail has been found wanting. It is not controversial to grant Scott that cuneiform writing was a remarkable tool for statecraft, and exploitation, in the first states of Mesopotamia, around 3500 BC. The same is true of writing in other early states. But in the first states of Scandinavia, particularly Denmark ca. AD 500–800, writing had a more troubled relationship with the state. No evidence survives that runic writing was used to administer taxation or much else, as it was in other agrarian civilisations. It is true that the runic script was used to commemorate kings, most famously by Haraldr Blátǫnn (r. ca. 958–ca. 986.). But, statistically speaking, it was more often used to aggrandize the sort of local big men who usually resisted centralized power. In this article, I survey the relationship between runic writing and administration. I consider what the Danish situation suggests about the relationship between states and writing and offer a tentative hypothesis of a short-lived attempt at runic bureaucracy around 800, which created—and quickly lost control of—a shortened variety of the runic script (the Younger Futhark).

In the 1750s the Danish kingdom and the Moroccan Empire came into contact, and concluded a bilateral treaty. As part of the accord, a Danish chartered company was established. The company was short-lived and the “special relationship” between the two powers soon withered. A result of this episode was a handful of texts that sought to describe Morocco to a Danish audience—an adventure tale, a captive narrative, an orientalist chorography, and a biography of the emperor—which sought to produce truths about the Danish encounters with Morocco, but also truths about the place and the peoples of Morocco. The article discusses these texts, where they originated, to whom they circulated, and what they had to tell about Morocco.