2500-2100 B.C. Burials in Allées couvertes or Ganggraeber, chambers of dolmen type but larger and with a roofed corridor approach. Thick-butted axes. Some copper. Beautifully neat and even chipping of flint daggers, lance heads, arrowpoints, some suggesting by their forms that they may be flint imitations of bronzes already in use on the Mediterranean. The same is true of perforated stone axes, ground into ornamental curves, such as are natural in cast metal.
2100-1900 B.C. Burials in stone cysts, progressively decreasing in size. Thick-butted axes. Chipped daggers and curving axes reminiscent of bronze forms continue. The first bronze appears, its percentage of tin still low.
235. The Bronze Age and Its Periods in Scandinavia
Bronze reached the Scandinavian region late, as a well developed art, and its working soon showed a high degree of technical and æsthetic excellence. But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. In other words, a local culture grew, much like the analogous local cultures in America which have been traced in previous chapters. Yet the basis of this Northern bronze culture was southern and Oriental invention; and the south and east continued to influence Scandinavia. The northern safety-pin, for instance, underwent the same stages as the southern one: backs that were first straight and narrow, then sheetlike, then bowed, with the ends enlarging to great buckles or disks. But the southern fibula, whatever its type or period, was one-piece and elastic, the northern at all times made of two separate parts, and without real spring.
Connection with other countries is evident from the Northern bronze itself, at least the tin of which, if not the alloy, was imported. Yet the finds of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, numerous as they are, do not contain a single specimen that can be traced to Egypt or to Greece. Even pieces made in middle Europe are rare. And molds, ladles, unfinished castings, prove that the North cast its own bronze on the spot. First knowledge of the art had evidently seeped in from the region of Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary, which in turn derived it from the Italian and Balkan peninsulas, which at a still earlier time had learned it from Egypt or Asia.
It appears, then, that it would be equally erroneous to regard the Scandinavian Bronze Age as an independent development or to regard it as a mere copy or importation from the Orient. It was neither; or, in a sense, it was both. Its origin lies in the great early focal point of civilization in the Near East; its specific form, the qualities which it took on, are its own. The disseminated ingredient, the basis due to diffusion, must be admitted as fully as the elements of local development which mark off a distinct Northern culture-area, or sub-focus of cultural energy.
This interplay of forces is typical also of the Iron and New Stone Ages, and it is the number of local centers of culture growth, their increasingly rapid flourishing as time went on, and the multiplication of connections between countries, that render the prehistory of Eur-Asiatic civilization so difficult. If enough were known of the life of the Palæolithic, it is probable that a similar though less intricate tangle of developments might be evident for that period also.
The resemblance to the interrelations of areas within America is manifest. The Southwest stands to southern Mexico as Scandinavia does to the Orient: suffused by it, stimulated by it, created by it, almost; yet at all times with a provincial cast of its own. The Southwestern specialist can trace a continuous evolution on the spot which tempts him to forget the obvious and indisputable Mexican origins. The Mexicanist, on the other hand, impressed by the practical identity of fundamentals and close resemblance in many details, is likely to see Southwestern culture only as a mutilated copy of the higher civilization to the south. Correct understanding requires the balancing of both views.
Close equivalents of the culture-areas of American ethnologists are in fact recognized by European archæologists. Thus, Déchelette distinguishes seven “geographical provinces” in the Bronze Age of Europe, as follows: 1, Ægean (Greece, islands, coast of Asia Minor); 2, Italian (with Sicily and Sardinia); 3, Iberian (Spain, Portugal, Balearics); 4, Western (France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, southern Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia); 5, Danubian (Hungary, Moravia, the Balkan countries); 6, Scandinavian (including northern Germany and the Baltic coast); 7, Uralic (Russia and western Siberia).
The fourteen hundred years generally allowed the Scandinavian Bronze Age are divisible into five or six periods,[35] which become progressively shorter.