Ebook: Trialectic Archaeology: Monuments and Space in Southwest Norway, 1700-500 BC

This book is based on the PhD thesis in archaeology at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, where the author was awarded the degree Doctor of Philosophy in 2004.

The aim of this project is to challenge established theories on how the Bronze Age landscape in Scandinavia in general, and Southwest Norway in particular, is formed, reformed and discursively constructed. The Bronze Age landscape in Norway has never been studied in its own terms. The archaeological material is usually compared with finds from areas further south, and Southwest Norway has been considered as a periphery, and even a colony, of centres in Denmark. What is different has either been neglected or given a less fortunate place within systems of evolution. The centre as a starting point for evolution and diffusion has created a myth of totality – an entirety that gives the impression of an inseparable entity of centre and periphery. For that reason the periphery is reduced to the centre’s ideas of it, in terms of what is identical with the centre’s own interpretation of the world. Then the periphery does not exist and extend beyond being an 'other' in a binary hierarchy, and becomes the second part in one and the same reality.