The Social Role of Nordic Bronze Age Visual Art: Perspectives from ornamented personal objects.

The visual art of the Late Nordic Bronze Age (ca. 1100-500 BC) is compelling in its difference. Bodily adornment objects, grooming tools, small figurines, and rock surfaces present us with otherworldly creatures, ships that can carry the sun, supernatural anthropomorphs, metamorphoses, instability, and ambiguity. The imagery seems to invite us into a world where bodies can merge and transform and where something can be two things at once, challenging the traditional archaeological toolkit of categorization and ordering. This pictorial wealth has been argued to reflect a cosmology involving sun worship, animal helpers, fertility, and ritual specialists. But, in this PhD project, I ask what more the visual art does. What does its use reveal about the social reality that the people wearing the art navigated in? What ideals are mediated in these bronze artefacts? In what way was the visual art made meaningful and how could it be understood? And how did the art and its properties entangle with human lives in the Late Nordic Bronze Age? My PhD project targets these and related ponderings through one general research question:
What was the social role of visual art in the Late Nordic Bronze Age, particularly in relation to gender and ontology?