New Books on Danish Corded Ware

I've spent most of the day translating a paper from Danish to English for a venerable gentleman who has become an incisive archaeological debater in his retirement. It's about the Danish instance of the various Corded Ware cultures that flourished in Europe from about 3200 BC to 2300 BC -- the Battle Axe Culture or Single Grave Culture.

After a lapse of more than a millennium, the Corded Ware gives us the Neolithic's first respectable number of individual furnished burials. This opens opportunities to pursue questions that the preceding Funnel-Beaker Culture with its collective megalithic tombs places out of our reach. The individual becomes visible again as she was in the Late Mesolithic. And the Corded Ware people lived by the rules: theirs was a highly conventionalised culture where a pattern-seeker finds much to hang on to. My friend Jonathan has pondered one of their graves for nearly a decade and a half and is still coming up with new ideas about it.

Two hefty new works about the Danish Battle Axe Culture have recently appeared -- all in all, nearly 2700 pages! Let's hope for some extensive new work about contemporary Swedish sedentary culture too. It all too easily becomes footnotes to immortal Malmer.

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Ebbesen, K. 2006. The Battle Axe Period. University of Copenhagen. ISBN 87-7528-620-3.

Hübner, E. 2005. Jungneolithische Gräber auf der Jütischen Halbinsel. Typologische und chronologische Studien zur Einzelgrabkultur. Nordiske fortidsminder B24. Copenhagen. ISBN 87-87483-72-6.

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[More blog entries about neolithic, stoneage, archaeology, Denmark; neolitikum, stenåldern,arkeologi, Danmark.]