This workshop aims to bring the core of a network together, and to start exchanging ideas and knowledge. Ultimately, we aim to build a platform for future collaboration, seeking to establish connections across and beyond the Nordic world. In the longer run, we intend to extend the network and develop ideas into conference sessions, research applications, and joint publications. Our academic aims will be to explore more nuanced understandings of how and why people move and migrate over short and long distances, to investigate how mobility creates, influences, and changes regional trajectories, and thereby to obtain a deep-time understanding of migrations.
The Bronze Age is relevant to study these perspectives for several reasons: First, it is the first epoch when the Nordic is viewed as a culturally united and homogenous region. Second, the Bronze Age is often portrayed as the first globalized era, when large parts of Eurasia got connected through trade, mobility and various forms of migration. Third, it has a long history of political misuse, for instance the Danish nazi party’s use of Bronze Age artefacts and monuments in their campaigns. One objective will therefore be to challenge stereotypical images of gendered migrations in the Nordic Bronze Age.
Even though recent developments within the natural sciences have generated new methods for exploring the ancestry and geographic origin of prehistoric human bodies, the communication of these results and their implications tends to be general and one-sided. Thus, instead of detailed exploration into gendered migration, we have seen a return of simplified views of men’s and women’s roles in society. Our workshop proposes to nuance the view of the Bronze Age by flipping the narrative into one that acknowledges the complexity of migration processes.
The workshop will be organized around four strands, in a roundtable format starting out from keynotes of c. 20 minutes duration.
Programme:
Wednesday 29th May
13:00-13:30 Welcome and introduction by the organizers
Lisbeth Skogstrand: Aims and ambitions of the network
13:30-15:00 Strand 1 The legacy of gendered migrations in the Nordic Bronze Age world. Perspectives from archaeology and bioarchaeology.
Catherine Frieman (Australian National University): Engendered methods against grand (migration) narratives
Mark Haughton (Aarhus University): Gender on the hoof: shaping genders in the more-than-human worlds of the Danish Bronze Age
Plenary discussion
15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-17:00 Strand 2 Theoretical and methodological approaches to gendered human mobility and migration. Perspectives from anthropology.
Karen Waltorp (Copenhagen University): Local scenes of gendered migrations: An anthropological lens & parallax effect
Plenary discussion
Thursday 30th May
09:00-10:30 Strand 3 Migrations, gender and regional dynamics. Perspectives from human geography.
Andreas Forø Tollefsen (Peace Research Institute Oslo): Migration routes: Insights from mapping and modeling of contemporary migration patterns
Marta Bivand Erdal (Peace Research Institute Oslo): Which types of migration contribute to what forms of societal change?
Plenary discussion
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Strand 4 The evolvement of Nordic Bronze Age gender identities. Perspectives from archaeology.
Karin Ojala (Uppsala University): “Foreign” objects and contact networks in a northern “periphery”
Jutta Kneisel & Stephanie Schaefer-Di Maida (Kiel University): Everybody had their role? The evolvement of Nordic Bronze Age gender identities from Early to Late Bronze Age
Plenary discussion
12:30-13 Summing up
Contact: Lene Melheim (a.l.melheim@khm.uio.no)