Economies of Destruction

In Bronze Age Europe, communities deliberately deposited prestigious metalwork on a massive scale in the landscape. The NWO VICI Economies of Destruction project aims to understand this puzzling practice by reconstructing how it emerged and developed between ca. 2350-1500 BC. This subproject deals with the region Denmark, north-west Germany and the Netherlands (north of the main river area). All metal objects from this region and time period were recorded in a database in order to identify patterns in the practices under investigation. The focus is on the choices that people made when they deposited metalwork: what they actually did. The results are published in the thesis "A Completely Normal Practice". The uploaded dataset contains the database and metadata