Since the Balkan war in the early 1990s there has been a growing global interest within the archaeological field for the study of war and warriors, not least within the study of the European Bronze Age. This lecture explores this new field in relation to cultural memory practice and through different means of material expression from northern Europe, such as rock art, material culture, bones and burial practice. The lecture is centred around a re- analysis of the bones and material culture from the famous Hvidegaard burial from Zealand in Denmark, dated to 1300-1100 cal BC, which was excavated in the early 1840S by no less than Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, the founder of the Three Age System.
Joakim Goldhahn is a professor in archaeology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. He has published six monographs, edited nine collections, and written extensively on North European Bronze Age and its rock art traditions, death rituals, monuments in landscape and landscapes in monuments, prehistoric ritual specialists, cultural memory practice and the history of archaeology. At the moment he is a visiting fellow at ANU's Rock Art Centre where he is working on a monograph about “The art of death – Bronze Age Rock Art and Burial Practice in Northern Europe”.