Wealth Put Beyond Recovery

A great deal of what survives from the Nordic Bronze Age was deliberately placed where it could not be got back: weapons, ornaments and vessels sunk in bogs, lakes and rivers, sometimes broken or bent first. Richard Bradley's work on hoards and votive deposits across prehistoric Europe treats this as a religious act rather than as loss or storage, and points out that the selection is patterned. Particular object types go into particular kinds of water, the deposits cluster at particular places over long periods, and the material is often the most valuable available.

The lur horns are the clearest case. They are large curved bronze trumpets, difficult to cast, and they are usually found in pairs in bogs, which suggests both that they were played in pairs and that they were given up together at the end. What none of this establishes is who the deposits were for. No name of a god or spirit survives from the period, and attempts to read the later Norse pantheon backwards into it are speculation, separated from the material by some two thousand years and by the arrival of new languages and peoples in between. The atlas keeps the period distinct from the Viking Age for exactly that reason.