Decentralized Complexity: The Case of Bronze Age Northern Europe

Abstract

What is power? How does it work? Is power in politically complex societies always constituted in the same, repeated ways, with variation only in the contextual details? This chapter examines the European Iron Age, a protohistoric archaeological context that may help answer these questions. When archaeologists think of power, they usually think of leaders or rulers, yet in no society is power held exclusively by elites. In some cultures, elite power is highly constrained and balanced by the power of ordinary people. For many prehistoric sequences, it is difficult to find archaeological proxies for the power of a non-elite majority, but in some protohistoric cases this kind of power is archaeologically visible and lends itself to study: Iron Age Europe is one of these and may help shed light on our understanding of other sequences as well.