Paper short abstract:

In Bronze-Age Denmark, human fire, cattle grazing, and turf-cutting maintained a plagioclimactic ecosystem known as heathlands. This paper investigates the shifting disturbance practices that people used to regenerate heather and embed themselves––and their dead––in the land.

Paper long abstract:

For millennia and well into the 19th century, humans have been managing and making a living from the heathland ecosystems of Skovbjerg Moraine in western Jutland. In the Bronze Age, these heaths functioned as winter grazing lands and a funeral landscape in which people entombed their dead. This paper investigates the human-mediated interactions of three companion species––fire, heather (Calluna vulgaris), and cattle––critical to the regenerativity of the human-heathland complex. Utilizing biological signatures embedded in grass and heather sods used to construct the burial mounds, I describe how human fire-setting and grazing practices interacted with the life history strategies of Calluna––a perennial ericoid species that dominates the heath––to produce a super-resilient ecology marked by pulses of extractive grazing and botanical rejuvenation. Bronze-Age Danish heaths present a model of mutuality-within-disturbance; they also offer a lesson in resource overexploitation. While Bronze-Age peoples’ fire and grazing practices produced sustainable landscape ecologies, turf-cutting associated with mound-building created wastelands of bare mineral soil, pulling vast areas of rangeland out of production. The price of honoring the dead was starving the living. The slow recovery of heather in these disturbance zones undercut peoples’ livelihood relation with the land, forcing the abandonment of funereal barrow-building and the reinvention of human-heathland relations in the Iron Age.