Bronze casting and cultural connections: Bronze Age workshops at Hunn, Norway

What is it about?

The authors present and discuss two segregated metal workshop sites at the Hunn burial ground in Østfold, south-east Norway, and address topics like the scale and character of the production and the cultural context of the finds. One of these sites, the Midtfeltet site, represents one of the most extensive Bronze Age metallurgical workshops in Scandinavia. The site is located in a region that has yielded comparatively few bronze artefacts, and illustrates a paradoxical trend in Norwegian Bronze Age archaeology: the dislocation between production of bronze objects and their final deposition. The Bronze Age workshops and monuments at Hunn are situated in an area with a Late Neolithic history, which after the Bronze Age continued to be used for burials and rituals. Hunn is situated by a natural harbor, and has good conditions for embarking inland on rivers and documented prehistoric tracks. Occurrences of unalloyed copper in a Bronze Age context may be considered an indication of trade in raw metals, which is also indicated by residues on crucibles at other central workshop sites in Scandinavia. Hunn was very probably, with its two workshop areas and signs of specialized production of, among other things, preforms, a regional center or aggregation site for craft production and exchange. A high degree of overlap between Nordic metalworking sites in terms of metallurgical know-how, refractory technology and artefact typology, but also symbolic decoration, is noted. This is indicative of ambulating, specialized metalworkers who had the aggregation site as their primary arena. A link to the Baltic is seen in the locally manufactured Lausitz-inspired pottery and an early cremation burial at Midtfeltet. The article focusses on the results of small-scale excavation campaigns at Midtfeltet in 1996-2006, covering an area of altogether c. 400 m2. The site produced a substantial amount of clay refractories, metalworking debris, flint, animal bone and pottery, C14-dated to c. 1300-700 BCE.

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Why is it important?

The Hunn, Midtfeltet site represents one of the most extensive Bronze Age metallurgical workshops in Scandinavia. The site is located in a region that has yielded comparatively few bronze artefacts, and illustrates a paradoxical trend in Nordic Bronze Age archaeology: the dislocation between production of bronze objects and their final deposition