Vast coastal plains that vanished below the waves thousands of years ago were highways to new territories and a cornucopia of natural riches for early humankind. Oceans of Archaeology presents these virtually unexplored areas of the archaeologicially world map. It scrutinises the submerged early prehistory of Europe and reveals a richness and diversity unmatched around the globe. Specialists from ten countries join forces to tell of flooded settlements, enigmatic sacred places, amazing art and skillful navigation. Multifarious traces of food preparation, flintworking, hunting and fishing vividly illustrate Stone Age daily life. While children's footprints lead the way to new investigations of early prehistoric life in these now inundated landscapes.

Danish director Lars von Trier has produced more than 20 films since his first appearance with The Elements of Crime in 1984. One of the most acknowledged – and most controversial – film directors of our time, Trier’s films often escape the representational production of meaning. In Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014. Signal, Pixel, Diagram scholar Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen offers a comprehensive discussion of Lars von Trier’s collected works. Examining Trier’s experiments with narrative forms, genre, camera usage, light, and colour tones, she shows how Trier’s unique ethically involving style activates the viewer’s entire perception apparatus. In understanding this affective involvement, the author frames the discussion around concepts from Gilles Deleuze, Alois Riegl, Brian Massumi and others on the haptic image, the diagram, affect and the signaletic material.

This volume presents the collated results of a number of archaeological investigations undertaken on the Danish peninsula Djursland over a period of almost 40 years. It begins with the findings of the excavations carried out around the former marine lagoon of Vængesø in the northeastern part of the Helgenæs peninsula. Then follows an overview of an excavation undertaken at the site of Holmegaard, located on the former Stubbe Fjord complex. One of the sites (Vængesø I) has been published previously in 1975, but the interpretation of this locality has been revised in the light of research and the results of other investigations undertaken over the intervening four decades.

The ancient Greek word koine was used to describe the new common language dialect that became widespread in the ancient Greek world after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Modern scholars have increasingly used the word to conceptualise regional homogeneities in the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. In this volume, twenty scholars from various disciplines present case studies that focus on the fundamental question of how to perceive and the social and cultural mechanisms that led to the spread and consumption of material culture in the Greek early Iron Age. Combined the chapters provide a critical examination of the use of the koine concept as a heuristic tool in historical research and discuss to what degree similarities in material culture reflect cultural connections. The volume will be of interest scholars interested in archaeological theory and method, the social significance of material culture, and the history of the ancient Greek world in the first half of the first millennium BC.

The Early Bronze Age Tombs of Jebel Hafit presents fifty burial mounds excavated by Moesgaard Museum in 1961-1971 in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf. These excavations were the first archaeological investigations at all in this part of the world, and they throw light on the beginning of the Bronze Age on the Oman Peninsula. The graves represent a fundamental transformation of the relationship between humans and the environment in the region, preceding the emergence of oasis agriculture. The graves contain the first objects of copper in the region and show that the exploitation of copper from the Oman mountains had begun. The tombs of Jebel Hafit are inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. The publication is the result of a cooperation between the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority and Moesgaard Museum.

Unfolding a Mountain has an innovative and thought-provoking approach to the neglected topic of the role of caves in the modern and recent historical past in Greece. A team of archaeologists, ethnologists, and a geologist present the results of a survey on Pelion Mountain in East Thessaly, Greece. Through an integrated ethnographic and archaeological approach, the project transcends its scientific frame and offers a human picture of the experiences of cave dwellers through historical evidence, interviews, physical anthropology, material culture, and graffiti. The book offers empirical documentation and theoretical reflections on the plurality of cave narratives in the Pelion landscape and on the factors influencing modern/recent historic cave use. Unfolding a Mountain is aimed at a broad audience that includes both academics and students of archaeology, ethnology, history and landscape studies, as well as members of the public with an interest in the rural facets of Modern Greek history. Although the geographic focus of this book is a portion of the eastern Greek mainland, many of the themes are relevant to the wider Mediterranean region, where caves are abundant.

Negative stories make the news. Drama and conflicts, victims and villains. They are our modern world. Or are they?This revised second edition on constructive news challenges the traditional concepts and thinking of the news media. It shows the consequences media negativity has on the audience, public discourse, the press and democracy as a whole.The book also explores ways to change old news habits and provides hands-on guidelines on how to do so. Moreover, the book presents numerous examples from the author’s ten-year tenure as executive director of news at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation where he led a successful paradigm shift in news production. Constructive News is a wake-up call for a media world that struggles for a future, as well as an inspirational handbook on the next megatrend in journalism.

In the Danish West Indies, hundreds of enslaved men and women and a score of Danish judges engaged in a broken, often distorted dialogue in court. Their dialogue was shaped by a shared concern with the ways slavery clashed with sexual norms and family life. Some enslaved men and women crafted respectable Christian self-portraits, which in time allowed victims of sexual abuse and rape to publicly narrate their experiences. Other slaves stressed African-Atlantic traditions when explaining their domestic conflicts. Yet these gripping stories did not influence the legal system. While the judges cunningly embraced slave testimony, they also reached guilty verdicts in most trials and punished with extreme brutality. Slaves spoke, but mostly to no avail. In Slave Stories, Gunvor Simonsen reconstructs the narratives crafted by slaves and traces the distortions instituted by Danish West Indian legal practice. In doing so, she draws us closer to the men and women who lived in bondage in the Danish West Indies (present-day US Virgin Islands) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Art of Asger Jorn is the first major work about one of Denmark's most important painters, Asger Jorn (1914-1973). It is not a typical biography depicting the outline of his life. Rather, the book sheds light on Jorn's artistic production: Who he was inspired by, which artistic movements he was in contact with, and - not least - what his paintings depict. This is also the focus of The Art of Asger Jorn in which Lars Morell, a Danish historian of ideas, analyzes Jorn's paintings. The author concludes that Jorn's paintings do not depict anything specific. Indeed, it is as if Jorn seized them in the midst of transformation, where the subject is turning into a new subject. Morell finds that the paradoxes and transformations characteristic of the works were influenced by the ever-changing nature of Jorn's own life. Asger Jorn was born in Denmark, but spent the majority of his artistic life abroad with workshops in both Paris and the Italian city of Albissola, famous for its skilled ceramic artisans. While abroad he discovered his great connection to the Nordic culture, and through his work with ceramics, he gained the necessary experience to liberate the colours of his paintings. While first and foremost a painter, he refined this artform by interacting with a variety of other art forms. The Art of Asger Jorn is thus not just a book about a single artist's work, but also a book about the mindset of modern art.

The first archaeological surveys and excavations in the state of Qatar were carried out by Moesgaard Museum, Denmark, in 1956-1974. A volume on the Stone Age sites was released by JAS in 1967, and the present publication includes the remaining investigations. Of special interest are several graves with iron swords and arrows and camels and a contemporary settlement with pottery showing close relations to Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. The first excavations at the early Islamic site of Murwab are presented, and the book is concluded with a full catalogue of the rock carvings from Jebel Jusasiyah.

This is a study of a unique collection of Inner Mongolian artifacts at the National Museum of Denmark. They are described, analyzed and presented in a catalogue of more than 800 items, documenting the daily life of pastoral society in and around the tent, in the herding of the animals, in caravan trade and in hunting, crafts, sports and games, and in ritual life. Information about the objects was obtained during two expeditions to Inner Mongolia in the 1930s led by the Danish author Henning Haslund-Christensen, who had many years’ experience of travel and expedition life in Mongolia. This is also a detailed account of the expeditions; of the routes, means and measures, as well as the worries and hopes of the participants; of their struggles with scientific aspirations; and of the conditions for collecting against the backdrop of the Chinese civil war and the Japanese occupation. The First and Second Danish Expeditions to Central Asia took place in 1936–1937 and 1938–1939 respectively. These expeditions were the sole foreign parties with access to the area at the time, and therefore their members were among the few observers of Inner Mongolian pastoral society at a time and place for which information was, and still is, scant and fragmented. Hence, the material objects and data obtained are of great scientific importance in the documentation of the life and material culture of Inner Mongolian herders in the 1930s – the main subject of the present book.

This book provides unique insights into Late Neolithic life, its organization and its economy, made possible by an altogether exceptional collection of recent archaeological findings in South Scandinavia from longhouses with sunken floors dating from this period.Through analysis and interpretation of these comprehensive materials, Danish archaeologist John Simonsen presents brand new findings essential for many wider interpretations of this crucial and fascinating transitional period from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age (c. 2350- c. 1600 BC).The basic materials presented and discussed in Daily Life at the Turn of the Neolithic were mainly found during new archaeological excavations in the central part of the Limfjord region of Denmark, but, in terms of the wider perspectives and considerations, often relate to the entire region and in several respects also to South Scandinavia - and beyond.

One man’s way of thinking about God has decisively shaped the political and economic rise of Nordic social democracy. 500 years ago, Martin Luther’s writings led to the Reformation in the Nordic countries, and his values and beliefs shaped more than just the church. Lutheranism is one of the most important influences on the Nordic welfare system and a general belief in social democracy. Indeed, Nordic social democracy itself can be seen as a modern form of religion, or “secular Lutheranism”. In Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy, Robert Nelson, an American observer and professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, brings a fresh perspective to the interrelated questions of religion, national identity, and governance in the Nordic world. Exploring how Lutheranism never went away as the true path to a new heaven on earth, Nelson shows how the form of Lutheran Nordic religion and culture changed radically, while its substance remained surprisingly unaltered.

In 1864, a large metal hoard of copper, bronze and silver objects was discovered at Pile in the southern Swedish region of Scania. The hoard has been dated to the onset of the rich Nordic Bronze Age, and emerges as the earliest, finest and one of the largest of the Nordic sacrificial deposits of metalwork in or near water. The metal hoard from Pile in Scania, Sweden provides the first detailed documentation, scientific examination and historical interpretation of the assemblage. Around 2000 BCE the site of Pile was networked with places near and the far in a manner that boosted the political economy of Southern Scandinavia, adding to an atmosphere of tensions and change -- and it made history. The chapters unfold as a ‘history from beneath’ beginning with place, things and time and concluding with metals and the worlds that intersected in Pile at the threshold of the long Bronze Age.

The year is 12,800 BP. Europe is entirely occupied by people of the so-called Upper Magdalenian culture. Well, not entirely one small region, southern Scandinavia, differs markedly from its neighbours. These lines open the first book-length treatment of the cultural evolution of late Ice Age forager societies at the northern edge of Europe. Splendid Isolation summarises more than ten years of research that connects the cataclysmic eruption of the Laacher See volcano in present-day western Germany with contemporary cultural changes. It also offers an in-depth treatment of the eruption’s impact on plants, animals and people as well as its cultural-historical consequences. Invoking the term ‘splendid isolation’, the author argues that despite the eruption’s evidently detrimental ecological impacts, it led to a regional cultural effervescence in the form of the Bromme culture. By charting this past calamity, the book also shows how the study of ancient disasters can be made useful in today’s debates of resilience, vulnerability and apocalypse.