Nourishing a structured world with living metal in Bronze Age Europe

Abstract

For over a thousand years, European peoples intently deposited bronze artefacts into the earth. This essay examines the motivation for doing so from a cosmological perspective. It argues that depositions were believed to support universal life processes and assure availability of resources for people and polities by literally “feeding“ universal creative energies. It is suggested that metallic ores were considered living materials that grew within the earth in locales usually at some distance from a given society and that they were embued with generative force that would be returned to the earth when metal was deposited within it. The vital life force was tangibly evidenced by metallurgical processes and uses and especially by the blue-green patina that copper and copper alloys acquire when the metal is exposed to moist conditions.

Keywords:

• Bronze Age
• cosmology
• living metal
• depositions
• copper patina

Notes

1. Similarly, in the Andes there is no radical disjunction between cults of nature spirits in the domain of agro-pastoralism and in mining. Mining, agriculture and livestock tending are linked (Harris 1989; Sallnow 1989).

2. For Bronze Age mining, see Kristiansen and Larsson (2005, 132–8) for large-scale operations; Timberlake (2009) for small-scale operations. Tin could also have been obtained from alluvial deposits of eroded rock by panning river gravel (Cunliffe 2001, 223).

3. Offerings to Christian saints made today at holy springs and wells in Ireland can include bottles of holy water from Lourdes, which are expected to enhance the spiritual potency of the local site (Ray 2010).

4. A prime example is found among traditional societies of the Northwest Coast of North America. See data in Seguin (1984, 1986), Walens (1982), Goldman (1975).

5. This theme is also widely found in prototypical Indo-European origins myths in which the universe is created by an energetically conducted (violent) act and by the subsequent expansion of human energy to form and maintain the cosmos (Lincoln 1986).

6. The concept of containment can occur on a broad scale and can include natural locations, such as a lake placed within the surface of the earth.

7. Chalcopyrite is a distinctive brassy gold. Native copper and cuprite (the latter often appearing with malachite and azurite; Davis 1924, 38) are brownish-red. Timberlake comments (2009, 94), with respect to early Bronze Age British Isles, that colored or metallic-looking minerals would long have been of interest as sources of pigment and notes Mesolithic camp sites coinciding with areas of malachite and azurite extraction.