The Rise of Bronze Age Society

'... much to admire...' Antiquity

'... a stimulating and brave book. ... I recommend it as an illuminating and well-written treatment of one of the key periods of European history.' European Journal of Archaeology

'... impressive and provocative ... dense, deliciously seductive ... it is a book which presents the most crucial virtue of all: it makes one think about material culture and about the kind of past that we, archaeologists, try to describe and explain.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Kristian Kristiansen is Professor at the Department of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg. His previous publications include Europe before History (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Social Transformation in Archaeology (2000) (with Mike Rowlands). He was the co-founder and first president of the European Association of Archaeologists and is a member of the Swedish Academy of History and Letters. Thomas Larsson is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Ume. He is the co-editor of Approaches to Swedish Archaeology (with Hans Lundmark) (British Archaeological Reports, 1989) and monographs on the Scandinavian Bronze Age including The Bronze Age Metalwork in Southern Sweden: Aspects of Social and Spatial Organization 1800-500 BC (1986).

Prologue - between Scylla and Charybdis; 1. A theoretical strategy for studying interaction; 2. Odysseus - a Bronze Age archetype; 3. Rulership in the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age; 4. Europe in the early Bronze Age - an archaeological background; 5. Symbolic transmission and social transformation in Bronze Age Europe; 6. The cosmological structure of Bronze Age society; 7. Among gods and mortals, animals and humans; 8. Cosmos and culture in the Bronze Age.