Ancestral commons: The deep-time emergence of Bronze Age pastoral mobility

TY - JOUR

T1 - Ancestral commons

T2 - The deep-time emergence of Bronze Age pastoral mobility

AU - Haughton, Mark

AU - Løvschal, Mette

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - New human-provoked and maintained landscapes emerged across northern Europe during the third millennium BC: open stretches of heathlands affording grazing pastures and social opportunities. The commitment between humans and heathlands produced ancestral commons, literally and figuratively, understood as an entanglement between pasture, funerary barrows, and transhumance. Focusing on western Jutland, Denmark, we combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to identify the character, strength, and temporal depth of these emergent links. Considering the ancestral commons as deep-time more-than-human conceptual entanglement, we identify socially and economically important rhythms of return which contribute to a new, shared anthropogenic landscape horizon and an ancestral past.

AB - New human-provoked and maintained landscapes emerged across northern Europe during the third millennium BC: open stretches of heathlands affording grazing pastures and social opportunities. The commitment between humans and heathlands produced ancestral commons, literally and figuratively, understood as an entanglement between pasture, funerary barrows, and transhumance. Focusing on western Jutland, Denmark, we combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to identify the character, strength, and temporal depth of these emergent links. Considering the ancestral commons as deep-time more-than-human conceptual entanglement, we identify socially and economically important rhythms of return which contribute to a new, shared anthropogenic landscape horizon and an ancestral past.

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0003-598X

JO - Antiquity

JF - Antiquity

ER -