A place for crafting? Late Bronze Age metalworking in southern Scandinavia and the issue of workshops

‘Workshops’ and ‘workshop production’ are central to archaeological understanding of metalworking in Bronze Age societies. In this article the concept of workshops is used as a starting point to review preconceptions about the social and spatial organisation of bronze crafting, focusing particularly on how it influences expectations of crafting evidence in the archaeological record. It argues that assumptions of a permanent, customised crafting place hosting the full manufacturing process, as often implied by the term ‘workshop’, are unsuitable for understanding the nature of bronze crafting in southern Scandinavia during the Late Bronze Age. Instead, drawing on evidence from south-eastern Sweden, the craft is characterised as flexible, embedded, and multi-locational. Furthermore, differences in crafting loci between ornaments and weapons are suggested to relate to the initiations of their intended bearers and to demonstrate the heterogeneous organisation of prestige goods production. Such user-oriented production provides an interesting example of the organisation of elite-motivated crafting outside the context of centralised states.