This volume explores processes of colonisation and cultural integration from the end of the last Ice Age to the present from a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective.All kinds of human mobility, short-distance as well as long-distance movements, short-term and long-term interactions are potential triggers for change and also cultural integration. The colonisation of an area most clearly brings into focus what kind of social fabric encompassed the actual historical processes. Recent perspectives on the social and cultural embeddedness of exchange, and how objects facilitate constructions of identities and political legitimacy, serve to frame and explicate the role of material culture in such processes.The contributions to this volume shed light on various social aspects of movement, migration and colonisation among hunter-gatherers and Neolithic groups as well as in chiefdoms and state societies. Geographically, an area spanning from the Mediterranean to Central Europe and the North Sea Region, Greenland and Siberia is covered.Three social and historical processes - the social aspects of colonisation, cultural integration and maritime interaction - are particularly discussed as interrelated phenomena.

Initially, the aim of this study was to examine technological, cognitive and symbolic aspects of metallurgy in southern Norway in the Bronze Age, i.e. 1700-500 cal. BC. To contextualize and understand the Norwegian data material, the scope was soon widened geographically as well as chronologically. As a result, evidence from the whole Nordic region has been considered and the time frame extended to the beginning of the Late Neolithic, i.e. c. 2400 cal. BC. In unexpected ways, the investigation ended up as an exploration of ideas, ideas belonging to the present as well as ideas belonging to the past. Basically, two sets of ideas are scrutinized: 1) ideas that have governed and still govern archaeological concepts of the Bronze Age, and 2) ideas that moulded Bronze Age mentality, arising, it is argued, from physical experience with metallurgy. In keeping with this, the 'webs of significance' - a phrase borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1973) - are to be understood as, on the one hand, the changing scientific discourses within which current archaeological ideas about Bronze Age metallurgy have evolved, and on the other, the prehistoric contexts and relations which gave meaning to metallurgy in the Bronze Age.