Embodying Cosmologies: The Art of Nordic Bronze Age Body-Objects

The visual art of the Late Nordic Bronze Age is tantalizingly 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, metamorphoses, instability, and ambiguity. Throughout the research history of Scandinavian archaeology, this pictorial record has been argued to reflect a cosmology involving sun worship, but this publication asks what more the art does. What does its use reveal about the social reality that the people wearing the art navigated in? In what way was the 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? In pursuit of answering these questions, this book studies portable art on bronze artefacts focussing on personal objects, mainly jewellery and razors – used and carried directly on the body. These “body-objects” establish a link between the visual art and its social context that enables the study of people and their worlds