Pictures from the Bronze Age are numerous, vivid and complex. There is no other prehistoric period that has produced such a wide range of images spanning from rock art to figurines to decoration on bronzes and gold. Fifteen papers, with a geographical coverage from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, examine a wide range of topics reflecting the many forms and expressions of Bronze Age imagery encompassing important themes including religion, materiality, mobility, interaction, power and gender.

Contributors explore specific elements of rock art in some detail such as the representation of the human form; images of manslaughter; and gender identities. The relationship between rock art imagery and its location on the one hand, and metalwork and networks of trade and exchange of both materials and ideas on the other, are considered. Modern and ancient perceptions of rock art are discussed, in particular the changing perceptions that have developed during almost 150 years of documented research.

Picturing the Bronze Age is based on an international workshop with the same title held in Tanum, Sweden in October 2012.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Chapter 1: The Swedish Rock Art Research Archives and Picturing the Bronze Age – an introduction
• Chapter 2: From folk oddities and remarkable relics to scientific substratum: 135 years of changing perceptions on the rock carvings in Tanum, northern Bohuslän, Sweden
• Chapter 3: Hyper-masculinity and the construction of gender identities in the Bronze Age rock carvings of southern Sweden
• Chapter 4: Mixed media, mixed messages: religious transmission in Bronze Age Scandinavia
• Chapter 5: Walking on the stones of years. Some remarks on the north-west Iberian rock art
• Chapter 6: A rock with a view: new perspectives on Danish rock art
• Chapter 7: Rock art and the alchemy of bronze. Metal and images in Early Bronze Age Scotland
• Chapter 8: The ‘Stranger King’ (bull) and rock art
• Chapter 9: Trading images: exchange, transformation and identity in rock-art from Valcamonica between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age
• Chapter 10: Carl Georg Brunius: An early nineteenth-century pioneer in Swedish petroglyph research
• Chapter 11: Alpine and Scandinavian rock art in the Bronze Age: a common cultural matrix in a web of continental influences
• Chapter 12: The maritime factor in the distribution of Bronze Age rock art in Galicia
• Chapter 13: Rock art as history – representations of human images from an historical perspective
• Chapter 14: Sword-wielders and manslaughter. Recently discovered images on the rock carvings of Brastad, western Sweden