Flint Daggers, Copper Daggers, and Technological Innovation in Late Neolithic Scandinavia

Abstract

This article seeks to clarify the reason for the flourishing of daggers during the first millennia of metal use in Europe. Flint daggers, usually characterized as direct copies of contemporary metal blades, circulated widely from around 4000 cal BC to 1500 cal BC in different parts of Europe. Among the best studied and most well-known flint dagger varieties are the early second millennium cal BC fishtail-handled varieties made in southern Scandinavia which are universally described as skeuomorphs of Central European metal-hilted daggers. In this paper, their putative skeuomorphism is re-evaluated through a close technological and contextual analysis, and a new way of conceiving of the relationship between fishtail flint daggers and metal-hilted daggers is proposed. Like most of the other widely circulating flint dagger types in Neolithic Europe, fishtail and metal-hilted daggers are produced through the application of specialized/standardized production processes and demonstrate a desire to cultivate special and perhaps circumscribed technologies on the part of the people who made and used them. This shared technological background is identified as the root of the ‘dagger idea’ which emerges in Europe at this period. Daggers, in any material, are identified as ‘boundary objects’ – things which bridge social boundaries, allowing people with different backgrounds to recognize similar values and ways of life in each other's cultures and which, consequently, facilitate communication and exchange, in this case of metal and of the technological concepts which were part of its adoption.

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