Chapter 1

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racial stock. These new arrivals first become important in the subsequent 'Migration Period' (see p. 66) and they seem to have sought western Norway in particular, for more than one rune-stone on the Vestland coast attests their presence and shows them to have been men from the regions of the upper Rhine, Frisia, and Francia. Indeed, their coming was in all probability a result of the development by the Frisians of a great trade-route between western Christendom and the Scandinavian north and, as such, it was not without importance in the cultural history of these far-off lands; thus grave-customs, especially in Norway, and pottery types altered under their influence and the northern peoples found themselves linked to the west Germans by a commercial bond that was to survive, firm and unbroken, into the Viking Period.
       But the naming of the Germans and the Goths has already involved the narrative in the faint and uncertain beginnings of history, and henceforward the tale must be elaborated by knowledge derived from historical sources. The time has come, therefore, to assemble the simple facts already brought to the notice of the reader and to conclude the archaeological account.
        The summary can be easily stated. The Stone Age in the north was pre-eminently a period of immigration, of successive arrivals of folk driven from the central plains of Europe to seek new homes. In a word, it was the period of the population of the north. The Bronze Age, on the other hand, was a static period that witnessed the consolidation of these various folk into a single and admirable northern civilization, distinct from that of southern lands, though always intimately connected with the civilization of north Germany by both a cultural and a racial bond. The pre-Roman Iron Age saw a serious degeneration of this northern civilization, together with a partial emigration of its peoples, but the Roman Iron Age itself was the time of a cultural renaissance that re-established the northern civilization as a powerful and well-equipped group of tribes, albeit a restless people with eyes turned enviously upon the richer lands of the south.         
       Throughout this length of time the real power and wealth of the north was centred in Denmark, and in Southern and Central Sweden, and the Baltic islands of Gotland and Bornholm, and it is, of course, in these places that the 'ages' of the customary archaeological classification can best be distinguished and defined. But northern archaeology is in reality much more complex than this simple division into periods has suggested, and no work in recent years has done more to show how danger-




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ous such glib classification may be than the brilliant and penetrating study by Dr. A. W. Brogger, Del Norske folk i oldtiden. (1) Dr. Brøgger has shown that in Norway, at any rate, the life of the people is well-nigh independent of the usual archaeological machinery of 'ages' and culture-periods. The introduction of agriculture during the Stone Age and the much later introduction of iron are, in his eyes, the chief events of domestic importance; in fact, except for changes in habits and pursuits thereby involved, the life of the Norwegians continued little altered from the Stone Age until the Viking Period; indeed, in many respects, as notably in the matter of equipment, it remained little altered until late historic times. Occupied in a long-established seasonal routine of hunting, fishing, and tilling the land, the Norwegians in their far-off isolated homes had little to gain by a greedy search for new fashions in the simple tools and weapons they required. Thus, throughout the Bronze Age of Denmark, the Norwegians were content with what was almost entirely a lithic equipment, and the 'Stone Age' lasted in a sense right up to the beginning of the Roman Iron Age. And there is no need, observes Dr. Brøgger in parenthesis, to be surprised at conservatism in the far past, since late in the last century, and long after the introduction of the grenade-harpoon, the peasants in the Skogsvaag near Bergen continued hunting the whale with bow and arrow.
       The truth is that culture-divisions are applicable only where they can be directly observed, and they must never, without strict examination, be held as automatically valid for adjacent communities. Thus it is probable that in other remote parts of Scandinavia, just as in many districts of Norway, the periodnarrative given in these pages is a meaningless confusion of a simple story. Therefore the culture-changes indicated must be held to apply only to the rich and vigorous peoples of certain geographically favoured parts of Denmark and Scandinavia, and as a background there remains always the steady and littlechanged peasant-life of the Stone Age folk. Indeed, even in Denmark it may be that the periods are too severely defined, for a Bronze Age habitation-site has been found at Voldtofte, close to Assens on Fyen Island, whereon lay sufficient of stone implements to suggest forcibly that stone was still in common use in the late Bronze Age. As a complement to this find there