"A groundbreaking work that provides a unique insight into Bronze Age societies"

Western Europe 3000 years ago was unlike the civilised Eastern Mediterranean states that were its contemporaries. Over 15 centuries, until 750 BC, it made its own ideology, history and myths. Signs of a self-consciously different European world, centred on the individual, are detectable from early 3rd millennium BC, developing fully in the Bronze Age as an ideal warrior style of living and dying. This new lifestyle is seen everywhere by the Early Bronze Age (2150 BC). Over the next millennium, successive transformations culminate in episodes when paramount chiefs dominate the territory. Their changing lifestyle created a shared ideology of personal identity, with common behaviour expressed through fashions in weaponry, dress ornaments, jewellery, even particular motifs like the water-bird, giving tangible expression to the notion of Europe as a continent of linked communities.

In Spain and Portugal this ideology emerged as engravings of individual warriors on hundreds of stone memorials called warrior stelae. Over 100 unique pictures, engraved on stone slabs and erected as public monuments, enable us to recreate part of the world-view of one Bronze Age society. This gallery of vignettes was engraved over 3000 years ago, when the chiefly societies of Atlantic Europe and the eastern Mediterranean literate civilisations were beginning to know one another directly. This book examines an intellectual aspect of that world: the pictorial expression of social values in societies without the use of writing.

The stelae display an ideological code, expressed symbolically in engravings of shields and armed warriors, supported by objects such as helmets and chariots, and more mysterious items, perhaps talismans, like mirrors. The author argues that it evolves vigorously, culminating in narratives, scenes of ritual, hunting or combat, and warriors with animal horns. Professor Harrison's analysis of this code provides unique insights into Bronze Age societies.

Richard J Harrison is Professor of European Prehistory at the University of Bristol.