Human conceptualisations of non-human animals in the Scandinavian Bronze Age: perspectives from Swedish rock carvings

Abstract

This dissertation explores human-animal relationships during the Bronze Age in Scandinavia (1800-500BC cal) through the lens of Southern Tradition (ST) rock art from Sweden. Over this period, tens of thousands of figures were carved into the exposed bedrock of the coastal region, including a significant portion of animal depictions. The idea of animals captured the imagination, and were important enough to people that they spent time recreating them in material culture. The resulting images represent materialised conceptions about animal natures. My aim is to explore these conceptions and the processes by which they are formed, in order to understand the relationships and roles of animals in Scandinavian Bronze Age society. The main research questions of this dissertation focus on how humans conceptualise animals within this cultural context, how these conceptualisations were materialised and negotiated in the medium of rock art, and what implications these conceptualisations have for animal roles in Bronze Age Scandinavian society. In this dissertation, I explore a Bronze Age ontological view of animals, encompassing understandings of their essential natures, capabilities, place in cosmology, inherent and economic values, roles within societies, and ideas about how to interact with them. I argue that investigating the attitudes of people towards animals is a necessary step toward understanding how humans and animals related to each other in lived experience. My research analyses 500 animal figures and 680 anthropomorphic figures from Bohuslän, Sweden in the contexts of the surrounding images and evaluates visual features of rock art figures through aesthetic and semiotic interpretive lenses. I record qualitative characteristics of rock art images in a quantitatively accessible format, categorised by features and stylistic choices on the figure level, instances of interactions between figures, and thematic contexts defined by other nearby figures on the rock face. I identify patterns of associations between images that reflect a shared visual understanding of animal images, and by proxy a shared ontological understanding of animal natures. I use this information to explore three thematic aspects that contribute to the broader picture of attitudes towards animals. In Chapter 6, I discuss semiotic and aesthetic choices in defining animals and argue that these aesthetic choices reveal changing relationships with animals over the course of the period. Chapter 7 explores the phenomenon of zoomorphism in non-animal figures (or applications of animal features to non-animal things), elucidating symbolic roles of certain animals within Bronze Age ontologies. Chapter 8 focuses on the conceptual gendering and sex(ualis)ing of animals and argues for an interpretation that reflects the anthropomorphisation of animals over symbolic allusions to agricultural fertility. In my conclusion, I synthesise the impressions and pattens emerging through these three lenses to identify underlying attitudes about the natures and roles of animals in the Bronze Age Scandinavian worldview and argue for the agentive roles of both rock art and animal persons in the negotiation of human conceptualisations of animals and human-animal relationships.