My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  But the Nebra sky disc is about 3,000 years more recent than the Goseck observatory. Human knowledge of the movements of celestial bodies developed over these three millennia. Some ingenious people managed to find a solution to an awkward problem: the fact that the solar year and the lunar year are not a perfect match. Twelve lunar months are 11 days shorter than a solar year. This lack of harmony must have appeared baffling at one time.

  If you add an additional lunar phase every three years, the solar and lunar years more or less keep pace. In Zich’s view, this would have been secret knowledge of great religious significance. The most powerful leaders had their own ‘astronomers’ who were able to interpret the course of the sun, moon and stars. These experts knew – partly thanks to the sky disc – when it was time to add an extra month.

  One way of dealing with the problem is described in a cuneiform text from Babylon that dates back around 2,700 years. This states that you need to add an intercalary month every spring when a particular phase of the moon – not a new moon, but a crescent that has been waxing for a few days – is near the Pleiades star cluster.

  The Nebra sky disc depicts exactly this position, with seven gold dots, the number of stars in the Pleiades that are visible with the naked eye, next to a crescent moon of exactly the right size. Those able to interpret the message of the bronze disc thus knew, about 4,000 years ago, what the Babylonians set down in writing over a millennium later.

  Greek writings that are approximately contemporaneous with the Babylonian ones also mention the Pleiades as an important marker showing the time to plough and the time to gather in the harvest.

  Those wishing to immerse themselves in the astronomy of early European Bronze Age cultures can make their way from the Museum for Prehistory in Halle to Nebra, which lies a few dozen kilometres to the south-west. On an elevated site very near the spot where the sky disc was found on the Mittelberg, the regional authorities have set up a large, lavish information centre. This contains a planetarium and an exhibition designed both for children and for adults with a specialist interest. One of the things I learn there is that the site where the disc was found on top of the Mittelberg was a place of worship and burial for several millennia – from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age – before it fell into disuse.

  The astronomers who mastered the art of interpreting the sky disc were probably in the service of a rich individual with a great deal of power. At the time of the Unetice culture, society was beginning to become far more stratified, and the most important leaders were starting to acquire more and more wealth, power and status. One of the signs of this is the burials known as ‘chieftains’ graves’ (Fürstengräber in German), large tombs containing valuable gifts.

  Dalia Pokutta, an archaeologist based in Gothenburg, has recently written a thesis on her study of the diet of a number of individuals buried in chieftains’ graves. Studying isotopes has enabled her to discern whether they ate much meat and other forms of protein, or whether they lived mainly on plants. Rather surprisingly, her results show that the people buried in these large, lavish tombs had an almost ascetic diet. She compares them to Indian yogis. Her interpretation is that those interred in chieftains’ tombs were regarded as priests or shamans, rather than as people whose power was based on their economic assets.

  The graves Dalia Pokutta studied Dalia Pokutta are in Poland. They are part of the Unetice culture that lay behind the sky disc. Her thesis and many other signs suggest that the early Bronze Age societies of Europe were what we now call theocracies, in which religious leaders had a very strong influence. Priests played an important role. But the same was true of traders, warriors and artists.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Rock Engravers

  Not many researchers get to have their findings presented in the form of a wall-to-wall carpet. But that honour has fallen to Johan Ling, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg. The carpet occupies a whole room at the Vitlycke Museum in Bohuslän. Visitors walking around it can trace Europe’s Bronze Age trade routes.

  The carpet was inspired by an article, which Ling published in 2013. Rarely has a Swedish archaeological study attracted so much attention. Suddenly the Bronze Age appeared in a new light.

  The article presented the first ever incontrovertible proof that both people and goods had circulated on a far larger scale than had previously been known. Older generations of archaeologists were only able to study the appearance of metal objects. The conclusions they drew were based on shapes, ornamentation and their own imagination. But the latest technology has made it possible to study isotopes and trace elements in metal, as German researchers have done with the Nebra sky disc. Ling is now able to show that there were links between Sweden and the Mediterranean, the Alps and the Atlantic all of 3,600 years ago.

  Just take the axehead found in the River Jösse outside Arvika in the province of Värmland. Made of solid bronze, it weighs about 1.5 kilos (3⅓ pounds). There is a hole in it for the shaft and, though made of bronze, it is similar to a stone axe in shape. Researchers have somewhat different opinions on whether bronze axes of this type were used for practical tasks, or whether they were essentially status objects. Such axes may have had standardised weights, which would mean they could be used as bronze ingots representing a specific value. The axe type is known as a Fårdrup axe, after the place in Denmark where they were cast. Ling himself thinks this particular one is more likely to have been cast in Värmland, even though no hearths used for casting metal have yet been found there. At any rate, archaeologists agree that it must have been cast in Scandinavia.

  Copper ore occurs in areas to the north of Arvika, and you might well imagine that the copper in an axe found in the River Jösse would come from that region. Yet that is not the case. Isotopes in the metal reveal that the copper is not from Värmland at all – but from Cyprus.

  At that time there was a great deal of copper mining on Cyprus. Copper ingots from the island went on long journeys. The copper that ended up in the axe, found in the River Jösse, was probably shipped via the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, then along some of the great rivers of Europe – perhaps the Danube or maybe the Dnieper.

  Another axe from more or less the same period was found on the island of Öckerö, in the northern part of the Gothenburg archipelago. It is also cast in solid bronze, though the technology used was more sophisticated. This axe is of a type known as a palstave – and we are not just talking shiny status symbols any more. Palstaves were definitely designed to split lengths of timber into planks. They were highly effective tools with a sharp, curved blade. The shape of the axe reveals that it must have been cast in England or France. The copper, however, is from neither place – it comes from Lavrion in Greece. Raw copper was probably transported from the Mediterranean up one of the French rivers, the Rhône or the Garonne. It was then unloaded in England, mixed with tin and cast to make the latest model of palstave.

  Ling has so far investigated about 40 bronze objects found in Swedish provinces including Dalsland, Bohuslän, Halland, Småland and Skåne. They have been shown to contain copper from the Alps, Spain, Portugal and Sardinia, and, in some cases, even from Greece and England.

  ***

  Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. There is very early evidence for copper mining in Europe. Copper artefacts found in Serbia and Romania are just as old as agriculture in those regions, going back about 8,500 years. The people of the Varna culture on the shores of the Black Sea in Bulgaria could already smelt copper and gold 6,600 years ago. This is shown by a number of spectacular burial finds. One such artefact is a large penis sheath in gold, belonging to a man in one of the graves at Varna, and the grave also contains other gold objects weighing about six kilos (13 pounds) in total. Ötzi the Iceman, who died in the Alps about 5,300 years ago, was carrying an axe made of copper with a high arsenic content. Such copper becomes harder and easier to cast than other types, but it is no match for bronze axes.

  It is unclear where people
first learned how to purposely mix tin and copper to make bronze. A number of early bronze artefacts about 5,000 years old have been found in central Asia and the Mesopotamian city of Ur in Iraq.

  To make bronze, you need tin, and tin mines were far rarer than copper mines. There were only a few places where tin could be mined. One such area was Cornwall in southern England. Several pieces of evidence have now emerged that suggest large-scale tin production began in the region around 4,200 years ago. That was just after the Amesbury Archer had died and the timber structures at Stonehenge had started to give way to megaliths. All the early European bronze artefacts analysed so far contain tin from Cornwall – including the gold plates in the Nebra sky disc.

  The map on the carpet in Vitlycke Museum shows networks extending over much of Europe. They included the rivers of central Europe, just as old-time archaeologists believed. But the maritime routes along the Atlantic coast were at least as important. This can be seen from all the artefacts found in Denmark and Sweden but originating in Spain, Portugal, France and England. In view of how ocean currents flow, it seems quite clear that one of the destinations would be the west coast of Sweden. Paddling from southern England to the western Swedish seaboard essentially meant following the ocean currents.

  These long-distance trading voyages called for a new type of boat. One decisive step was the technology of building boats from planks, rather than making them from hide or dugout tree trunks. The Danish National Museum in Copenhagen houses a vessel built using this method, known as the Hjortspring boat. Though it was built in the early Iron Age, around 350 BC, we have reason to believe that the people of the Bronze Age were already able to build such boats.

  It is absolutely clear that the Hjortspring boat was designed for battle. Alongside it, in the bog where it was discovered, 169 spears and lances, 11 swords, a number of pieces of chain mail and the remains of about 80 shields were found. The vessel’s prow and stern were identical, and it was perfectly symmetrical in structure. The oarsmen simply had to swivel 180 degrees to change direction at lightning speed, and they could disappear in the same direction they had come from.

  Danish researchers have had a team of elite rowers test a replica. The athletic men managed to row nearly 100 kilometres (60 miles) in a single day. At that speed, a vessel can reach England from the coast of Jutland in under a week. The English Channel is just over 30 kilometres (20 miles) wide, a distance that a good team of rowers can cover in half a day.

  Cutting lengths of timber into planks of exactly the right thickness called for axes. While stone and copper axes were some help, the big breakthrough came with the bronze axes. Once the technology of casting artefacts in bronze was well established on the Atlantic seaboard, things moved very fast.

  A virtuous circle came into being: better metal axes enabled people to split timber into planks and build more seaworthy vessels. Better vessels made maritime transport faster and safer, enabling people to exploit newly discovered deposits of copper and tin. New mining sites provided raw materials for more bronze axes, which became more and more effective, and so on.

  The result was an explosive development in the direction of a new type of society – one in which wealth, trade and aristocracy became far more important than in the past. Against this background, it is not surprising that certain men came to have a very large number of descendants – so many that they account for over half of Europe’s modern-day population. Boats and metal can account for the dispersal of haplogroup R1b along the Atlantic seaboard and for the fact that the dispersal got under way at the time of the Bell Beaker culture.

  The fact that R1a became so common further east is also linked with the successful pastoralist cultures that already existed at the end of the Stone Age, and doubtless also with the domestication of horses. But the best explanation for the fact that my forebear ‘Ragnar’ became the forefather of nearly one in seven family history researchers with Swedish ancestry is the Bronze Age trading network. This is the picture that emerges when, with Peter Sjölund’s help, I study the dispersal of men with the R1a-Z284 mutation, descended from the individual I have dubbed ‘Ragnar’.

  A year has passed when Peter Sjölund and I meet for the second time. It is a sunny Sunday in October 2014, and we are at the Genealogical Association in Solna, looking at maps produced by some Russian enthusiasts. The Russians are genealogy researchers with an IT background who have set up a firm called YFull specialising in the analysis of Y-chromosomal DNA. They have collected data from a large quantity of published research, but also from private family history researchers, particularly the pioneers who have taken the ‘Big Y’ test.

  On the maps we can see that ‘Ragnar’ appears to have lived somewhere near Denmark, probably in Jutland or Schleswig-Holstein. His lineage was there 4,500 years ago, at the time when the Corded Ware culture was dominant in this region. From there, one of Ragnar’s descendants moved across to Sweden some 3,900 years ago. This must have been a sea voyage, and he probably landed on the west coast. It looks as if he arrived at exactly the same time as rich treasures of bronze began to make their appearance in Sweden.

  The Bronze Age man who came here about 3,900 years ago would eventually have a huge number of descendants of his own, including my grandfather Eric, my father and my brother. Our forefather probably spoke an Indo-European language, which may have been a kind of Gothic, as the archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen believes.

  ***

  When the trade in bronze reached Scandinavia, the people living there obviously had to pay for all the ingots they purchased. One of their main means of exchange was amber.

  This golden-brown, translucent stone could be found on sandy beaches along the west coast of Jutland and in the southern Baltic. Amber was already seen as valuable and special in Palaeolithic and early Neolithic times. Amber beads and other objects often featured among grave gifts in Scandinavia.

  But just as bronze started to become increasingly common in Scandinavia, people there stopped burying amber grave gifts. Instead, large quantities of amber have been found in graves and hoards elsewhere in Europe. And the most extensive finds of Bronze Age amber are at exactly the same locations as some of the main copper mines.

  At the beginning of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, amber came mainly from western Jutland. However, Scandinavian Bronze Age rulers seem to have taken control over other amber-rich regions further east, along the shores of Poland and Germany. There also seems to have been a network of maritime routes across the Baltic. At the end of the Bronze Age, about 3,000 years ago, a bronze workshop emerged in Hallunda on Lake Mälaren, now a suburb south of Stockholm. In Bronze Age times, Hallunda was an important settlement on a sea inlet.

  The carpet in Vitlycke Museum allows you to follow trade routes in all directions, with flows of metal going up to Scandinavia and amber from the Baltic flowing in the other direction. The routes from the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Alps ran via major rivers such as the Elbe, the Danube and the Vistula, and, above all, along the Atlantic coastline.

  And Cornwall, in England, was a nerve centre in this trade. The tin mine – a rarity – was in Cornwall, and it was there that bronze ingots were produced.

  Three shiny yellow substances were greatly valued during the Bronze Age: gold, bronze and amber. There must have been other important wares as well. The wrecked vessel known as the Uluburun provides unique evidence from the eastern Mediterranean. The Uluburun was found just off a cape near the Turkish town of Kaş. On the basis of the annual rings in its timbers and other evidence, it is estimated to have sunk over 3,300 years ago.

  The cargo of the Uluburun included 10 tonnes (22,000 pounds) of copper and a tonne (2,200 pounds) of tin – exactly the right proportions to cast 11 tonnes (24,250 pounds) of bronze. There was amber from the Baltic, gold, and semi-precious stones such as quartz and agate. There were also over 100 terracotta jars containing goods such as glass beads, resin, olives, almonds, pine nuts, figs, grapes and pomegranates. Other luxury
items included ivory, hippopotamus teeth, tortoiseshell and ostrich eggs.

  Less is known about the goods that were traded from northern Europe, apart from amber. Halle an der Saale in Germany contributed salt from its salt mines. In all probability, furs and slaves were shipped southwards from Scandinavia. However, salt, furs and slaves leave less obvious traces than bronze, gold and amber.

  In contrast, the images engraved on rocks by Bronze Age people are still there several millennia later.

  ***

  Johan Ling wrote his doctoral thesis on Bronze Age rock carvings. Such engravings have been found at many places worldwide. But the largest concentration, including some of the largest and most striking images, is to be found in the municipality of Tanum, in Bohuslän. This is the site of Vitlycke Museum, and the whole area around it has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  What was new in Ling’s thesis was that he systematically compared rock art locations with geologists’ estimates of the position of the coastline in earlier times. This reveals a pattern that is far from obvious to a person walking around among fields, grazing land and copses in the farming landscape of Bohuslän.

  Today’s Vitlycke lies several kilometres from the coast, a long way from seaside resorts such as Hamburgsund, Grebbestad and Fjällbacka. But the sea level during the Bronze Age was 15 metres (50 feet) higher than it is today. At the time when the Bronze Age people were engraving their rock art, the rocks were right on the shoreline. Vitlycke, for example, lay some way up a large sea inlet. This immediately makes it clearer why boats are such common motifs in these pictures. There are thousands of examples.

  In the past, many archaeologists focused more on the farming landscape. They took it for granted that the people who engraved the images were primarily farmers. This led them to regard the boats as essentially symbolic, an element of Bronze Age religion. But we now know they were also an important part of everyday life.