joinTime
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As it rests on a sketchy macro-chronology the Bronze Age is often interpreted as a rather static configuration of cores, peripheries and margins, or as essentially autonomous cultural regions. In response, joinTime will break new ground in two interlocked thrusts. In the first one, the newest science-driven methods will be activated at Aarhus University, Department of Physics & Astronomy (AMS Centre). In the second one, joinTime will use the achieved wide-ranging time-geography grid to test and detail current models including an alternative frame recently proposed by Aarhus University, Department of Archaeology, conceptualising the Bronze Age as an interconnecting web-like process: As this early form of globalisation unfolded decisively c. 1700-1500 BCE, the Bronze Age was in vivid progress across large tracts of Afro-Eurasia knit by bronze and by other transactions. The same research tentatively locates southeastern Europe as an engine in this process while also pinpointing links with Scandinavia and the Aegean as critical. The porous boundaries of the Bronze Age world was fostered by the intensive use of and trade in bronze (copper, tin), but transactions comprised many other goods and ideas tied thereto. The processual but variably multi-scalar character of this is powerfully exemplified by density-maps of the growth and spread of metal-related culture in Scandinavia 1700-1500 BC. The historical breaking point is clearly situated within the 16th century BCE when the networking through entrepôts intensified and expanded enormously. This is hypothesised to form part of a broader globalisation-like reality of Bronze Age consolidation.
joinTime asks precisely when and where this phenomenon was first consolidated in a transect from Scandinavia over the Carpathian Basin to the Aegean and how it took form as a geographical and culturally interweaving process. Firstly, aided by site-specific and link-indicating data, a fine-meshed grid of radiocarbon dates will be established across the transect from c. 1700 to c. 1500 BCE: this will push Bayesian statistics onto entirely new ground as this methodology has never previously been employed to firmly elucidate contemporaneity and culture-geographical links. Secondly, the results will spearhead a historical inquiry into the mode, intensity and direction of interactions.
joinTime asks precisely when and where this phenomenon was first consolidated in a transect from Scandinavia over the Carpathian Basin to the Aegean and how it took form as a geographical and culturally interweaving process. Firstly, aided by site-specific and link-indicating data, a fine-meshed grid of radiocarbon dates will be established across the transect from c. 1700 to c. 1500 BCE: this will push Bayesian statistics onto entirely new ground as this methodology has never previously been employed to firmly elucidate contemporaneity and culture-geographical links. Secondly, the results will spearhead a historical inquiry into the mode, intensity and direction of interactions.
