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Accepted Paper:

Crafting flint daggers in early 2nd millennium Scandinavia: knapping, smelting and new way of thinking about technology  
Catherine Frieman (University of Nottingham)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the crafting of flint daggers in Scandinavia during the early 2nd millennium and contrasts their production with the development of metal-working in the same region. Both dagger knapping and metal smelting are placed into wider social, technological and regional contexts to discuss the relationships between the old technology and the new.

Paper long abstract:

Flint daggers are such a characteristic artefact of late 3rd and early 2nd millennium Scandinavia that, until recently, that chronological phase was called 'Dolktid' - the dagger period. The daggers themselves have been repeatedly studied for insights, for example, into chronology (Lomborg 1973), technology (Stafford 1998) and social structure (Apel 2001). They are traditionally described as direct, morphological imitations of contemporary copper/copper-alloy daggers from central Europe which are scarce in Scandinavian contexts. In this paper, I will place early 2nd millennium, Scandinavian flint dagger production into a wider regional and chronological context in order to discuss how the crafting of flint daggers in Scandinavia relates to the adoption of metal. I will further compare their production to contemporary Scandinavian metal-working—both in process and in product. I will suggest that, in crafting flint daggers, knappers were not necessarily seeking to imitate metal objects so much as to engage in a new way of making things which relied on specialised techniques that produced widely recognisable types of objects.

Apel, J. 2001. Daggers, Knowledge and Power. The Social Aspects of Flint Dagger Technology in Scandinavia, 2350-1500 Cal BC. Coast to Coast-Books 3. Uppsala.

Lomborg, E. 1973. Die Flintdolche Danemarks. Studien über Chronologie und Kulturbeziehungen des siidskandinavischen Spatneolitikums. Copenhagen: Universitetsforlaget I Kobenhavn.

Stafford, M. 1998. In search of Hindsgavl: experiments in the production of Neolithic Danish flint daggers. Antiquity 72: 338-49.

Panel S27
Making the Bronze Age: craft and craftspeople 2500-800BC
  Session 1