Ancestral commons theorized: The entanglement of cosmology, community and landscape use in Bronze Age Northern Europe

Abstract

The emergence of open, disturbed grazing landscapes across Early Bronze Age Northern Europe coincided with a boom in the building of monumental barrows, often placed in linear arrangements. The co-emergence of landscape and monument forms suggests an intimate link between cosmology, communities and pasture, which has not featured prominently in prehistoric narratives. We propose and explore a framework of ‘ancestral commons’ to recognize how these landscapes were always both cosmological and practical, with the ancestral presence acting as a key undergirding to potentially fraught issues of grazing rights and maintenance of pasture. We explore specific examples of pastures and linear arrangements of barrows across Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe to explore the institutional entanglements of communities, ancestral infrastructures and landscape forms, such as heathlands. We argue that such complexes were connected to new forms of communities of living and dead, and of landscapes and associated landscape practices, through which a shared sense of the past and ancestral affiliation could be communicated and consolidated.