This chapter posits the processes that favored the rise of ranked polities in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age. We put forth the Supra Regional Interaction Hypothesis to explain how elite households were able to consolidate political power through their involvement in boat building, timber extraction, long-distance exchange, and raiding for slaves with the goal of financing trading expeditions to secure coveted metals. These elite households were organized into supra regional political sodalities that controlled political power, surplus production, debt, exchange, feasts, and warfare as well as ritual and religious means. We hypothesize that this sodality functioned as types of “secret society” as described by Hayden (2018). Thus, in order secure boats for long-distance exchange of metals and other exotica, the said political sodalities established trade confederacies, alliances, and colonies between rich agro-pastoral regions (more coercive) and regions rich in timber (more cooperative) – the latter ones famous for its rock art. They established transregional networks that linked and controlled interaction and exchange between regions with varied forms of environments and social organizations, spanning from more coercive to cooperative social settings (Feinman 2017). In doing so, they could control labour, raw materials, skills, and surplus production over large areas. Moreover, we theorize that aggrandizing households sponsoring boat building and timber extraction also reaped many benefits stemming from the capturing of slaves. We also claim that the rock was made and controlled by members of “secret societies” and that the abundance of rock art sites in more cooperative timber-rich regions should be seen as an outcome of political/ritual interactions with elites from more coercive areas (Figure 4.1).

In this chapter, I will argue that trade and exchange, whether civilised or uncivilised, have to be understood by developing a theory of value. Marx’s well-known distinction between use value and exchange value was predicated on whether the product of alienated labour confronted the producer as ‘something alien, as a power independent of the producers’ (Marx and Engels 1970: 16). In the passages on commodity fetishism in The German Ideology, the laws of the commodity market are compared to the superstition of the savage who fashions a fetish with his own hand and then falls down and worships it (Arthur 1970: 17). Extrapolating to the remote past that the product of our labour continues to confront us as something alien has a certain relevance for understanding long-term histories of inequality.

In many European regions, neolithization processes are linked with ritual economies that include the construction of megalithic monuments. As paleo-environmental and archaeological archives of the North Central European and South Scandinavian Funnel Beaker societies have proven to be excellent, the reconstruction of social processes linked with the introduction of horti- and agriculture and with the construction of first monuments displays a well-researched example for the investigation of long-distance contacts. It becomes obvious that long-distance contacts of these societies indicate different purposes in different stages of their economic and social development.

The Bronze Age was a period of premodern globalization across a number of parameters, which may deserve the term ‘bronzization’ – a multi-scalar process of bronze-led connectedness across a macro-region in Afro-Eurasia (Vandkilde 2016, 2017b). The onset of bronzization dates to c. 2000 bce, a time-point that marks the first historical threshold: bronze was now used over much of the Bronze Age macro-region (Figure 13.1). Another tipping point occurred c. 1600 bce, expediting the full implementation and floruit of bronze-based culture, whilst a phenomenal shrinkage began c. 1200 bce, which marked the beginning of the end of bronzization. Bronze Age connectedness in Afro-Eurasia emerged from innumerable transports of goods, encounters, local responses to the transculturally exotic, and the surge in the economy, creativity, and innovation that characterized the entire period. Local histories thus became linked through encounters of neutral, diplomatic or conflicting nature: intersecting interaction spheres may have been the fundamental building blocks of the vast grid of bronzization (Figure 13.2).

The Bronze Age was a time of long-distance exchange. The introduction of the folding stool and the single-edged razor into Southern Scandinavia, as well as the testimony of chariot use during the Nordic Bronze Age Period II (1500–1300 bc), give evidence of transfer of ideas from the Mediterranean to the North. Amber, from the North to the Mediterranean and even beyond, and beads of Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass from Nordic Bronze Age burials, provide physical evidence of long-distance exchange.

The archaeology of Eurasia has undergone a tremendous change in the last thirty years. The chronology was completely revised by using calibrated radiocarbon dates. The radiocarbon revolution was already on the horizon in the 1970s (Renfrew 1973), but the whole potential for Prehistoric archaeology emerged from calibration since the 1990s. And this changed a lot. The Neolithic period started much earlier than previously thought; the Bronze Age in Central Europe was also dated much earlier. Perusing archaeology handbooks from the 1980s, the changes in our knowledge become clear. For the first time Prehistoric archaeology was able to date archaeological findings directly by scientific methods. It was no longer necessary to speculate about the time necessary for the formation of archaeological layers in tell settlements. Prehistoric archaeology was no longer dependent upon the Egyptian or the Mesopotamian chronologies. Yet, the revised chronologies make it necessary to reassess the whole framework of interpretations. New finds were the motor of new research. In 1991, a mummy was found in the Ötztaler Alps near the Hauslabjoch. The archaeological importance of the find attracted detailed research on the life and the death of ‘Ötzi’. An end to this research is still not in sight (Fleckinger 2011). The first dating of the mummy to the Early Bronze Age in the second millennium bce had to be revised after the radiocarbon dates. Ötzi died in the last quarter of the fourth millennium bce. This surprising date triggered a complete revision of the alpine Late Neolithic and Copper Age (de Marinis 1992: 389ff.). Firstly concerned was the Italian Remedello culture, but then all other cultures in the regions as well. The new chronology also touched upon the huge number of anthropomorphic stelae in the alpine region (Casini 1994; Philippon 2002; Casini and Fossati 2004). Whole groups of metal objects like the halberds were re-dated. Their development did not take place during a short period in the second millennium but instead during a very long one starting from the middle of the fourth millennium bce (Horn 2014). Actually, the revision of the regional chronology was part of a comprehensive rearrangement of chronologies in Europe. This concerned especially the chronology of the third and fourth millennia bce.

Diagnostics of low-impact foreign intrusions … would include the presence of significant quantities of all defined categories of artifacts, architecture, and iconography. Artifacts, both foreign imports and locally made copies, as well as foreign symbols rendered in a local style should be found in elite and non-elite contexts.

Linking political economy and ritual economy perspectives focuses our attention to the articulation of aristocratic behavior and social hierarchies in chiefly and transegalitarian societies. The emergence, legitimation, and maintenance of aristocracy, heterarchy, and hierarchy is often linked to the widespread circulation, deployment, production, and use of alienable and inalienable goods (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Earle 1997, 2002; Hayden 1998, 2001, 2011; Mills 2004; Agbe-Davies and Bauer 2010), but while such items may be restricted, they may also be appropriated by rivals and non-elite aggrandizers are threatened. Social institutions based on an emergent political and ritual economy typically involve complex interactions of labor intensification, ritual structures, surplus mobilization, and control over the distribution of highly valued and often exotic goods. Inalienable goods become increasingly restricted as elite aggrandizers institutionalize their authority and exert limitations over exchange nodes and spheres of influence (Earle 2002: 39).

Megalith construction is invariably associated with complex exchange networks, and this is undoubtedly the case with Stonehenge (Figure 3.1), built and rebuilt in five stages over a period of c. 1,300 years during the transition from stone to bronze (Darvill et al. 2012). Ethnographies living traditions of megalith building, such as in southern Madagascar, reveal exchanges between wife-giving and wife-taking lineages, between women of different lineages and clans, between quarry-workers and tomb-builders and between hosts and mobilized labour (Parker Pearson 2002, 2010). One of the major exchanges in such societies is that of labour for hospitality and for the blessing of the ancestors (Layard 1942; Hoskins 1986; Adams 2016). Hosts exchange wealth for honour and renown, both for the living and for the dead. In many cases, the exchanges are obligatory rather than voluntary, to satisfy those in power and to appease the supernatural.

A notable feature of the European Bronze Age is that many regions were able to establish successful metalworking traditions based partly or entirely on imported metal supplies. Geological controls on the distribution of metal resources, together with various technological constraints and limited sharing of mining and metallurgical expertise, meant that some areas emerged as strong producers of primary metal, while others relied on trade for their needs. The exchange of metal, through whatever agency, created economic dependency and was an important channel for the spread of other cultural influences. Control of metal circulation by individuals or groups for their own benefit had important implications in terms of economic power and the political control exercised by these emerging elites.

At the arrival of Columbus to the Americas, the Spanish concentrated their colonial enterprise in the Caribbean. Here they encountered some groups that showed strong social differentiation but without the presence of a state bureaucracy. It is for this reason that the ancient Caribbean has been considered since early on by anthropology and archaeology as an ideal place for the study of non-state, stratified societies (e.g., Fewkes 1907; Mason 1941). For example, recognizing the stratification among these groups and, yet, the absence of the institution of the state, Steward (1948) classified them as the Circum-Caribbean Tribes, eventually becoming an intermediate stage in his evolutionary scale between the egalitarian and traditional Tropical Forest Tribes and the Andean civilizations. The description of this category is very similar to today’s concept of chiefdom developed decades later by Service (1962), a former student of Steward. In 1955, Oberg also used the Caribbean as an example of a category in his classification system that he called Political Organized Chiefdoms, the first time the term chiefdom was formally defined in anthropology. The interest on the Caribbean waned in anthropological archaeology in the 1960s with the advent of the New Archaeology that favored focusing on the study of stratified societies on the so-called core areas such as Mesoamerica and the Andes.