Migrating Matriarchs or Imported Items? Exoticism, Materiality and the Construction of Identity

By Samantha Reiter (farksr@hum.au.dk)

ESR Fellow, Århus

The principle focus of Migrating Matriarchs or Imported Items is to understand the causes and consequences of migration within Bronze Age societies. To do this, the study will examine the nuances of gender identity construction in both ‘foreign’ and ‘local’ contexts. The project will therefore examine Bronze Age society in cross-section, honing in on four principle permutations: 1) Local person with local goods, 2) Local person with foreign goods, 3) Foreign person with local goods and 4) Foreign person with foreign goods. As the title suggests, the focus of Migrating Matriarchs will be on women and the artefact-sets with which they were interred...especially when these artefact sets are located outside of their material culture ‘homeland’. However, men shall be examined as well as the movement of non-local male razors.

 

 The goal is to perform a wide-reaching study of Early to Middle Bronze Age material from Central Europe, rather than a single-region or single-cemetery work. Migration shall be determined through analysis of non-metric traits and strontium and oxygen isotopes. The results of these tests will be overlaid on the regional type of the grave goods interred with each individual in order to form a framework for analysis of the social pressures and effects of migration within the Early to Middle Bronze Age.




Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics | Aarhus University | Moesgård Allé 20 | DK-8270 Højbjerg | Denmark | Email: aal@au.dk | Tel: +45 8942 1111