Re: Guts and River Mouths

"tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> ( Sat Oct 5, 2002  10:44 am)
<<Re your description of the intense portage activity at the Trollhättan
falls in the 1500's; you should bear in mind that at the time Denmark
comprised both sides of the Øresund and that we levied hefty sound dues and
that the mouth of the Göta Älv was Sweden's only access to the seas outside
the Baltic: the activity was part of the
well-organized efforts of a centralized state. A local chief in Pliny's time
would have been able to do much less.>>

I can't argue that the scale had to be less grand and the participants
different, but the principle was the same. And that idea of controlling
either the source or the route along which valuable material or goods were
traded was probably by Pliny's time an old one. In fact the rise of
political power may have occurred exactly in this way, supplying the extra
capital needed to finance a court and a military.

With regard to the placement of neolithic tombs in western Sweden,
Maximillian Baldi wrote that they seem to be on borders reflecting the
"rivalry between more powerful clans [which would lead] to chiefdom-like
social organizations, particularly in strategic areas through which the trade
of the sought after status goods, including copper, amber and flint had to
flow due to geographic limiting factors."

The power that comes from controlling trade may first have been in the hands
of free-wheeling merchants, but merchants need to be protected from those not
honoring the exchange system. Bronze did not come to bronze age scandinavia
for nothing and it would not have kept coming if the rules of exchange were
not enforced -- most probably by locals who were financed by the merchants --
at least until things like the far-reaching Roman Army were fully developed.
Someone wrote: "The Bronze Age [in Scandinavia] lasted through a millennium
from about 1500 to about 500 B.C., a period in which... the finest Bronze Age
implements in Europe north of the Alps [were created] , in a country without
metals. Every piece of copper, tin, bronze and gold was bought from distant
lands, transported and transformed and paid for by an export.... Export is
the secondary payment for the imported goods." Whatever was paying for that
bronze had to be controled as well and it appears there were already "elites"
who had that job and they mainly ended up with the bronze.
As far as river mouths go, I have this quote (with unfortunately no cite)
"the Danish Viking Period, often considered an attack from the Danes, in fact
started as a defensive measure and retaliation against Charlemagne's
aggressive military policy and restrictive commercial policy. Charlemagne ...
closed the entrance to the important trade routes, the rivers. For centuries
Danish shipping and commerce had been able to use these water ways. The
extermination of the Saxon nation just south of the Danish border, the
conquest of the river Elbe, and the threatening advance towards the river
Eider, which served the same purpose as the Kiel Canal of today, was an
imperialistic provocation against Danish shipping and trade." One should
mention that it was not for centuries but millennia that these waterways had
been so used.

The pay-off for controlling trade routes or sources was something that was
evident in the Celtic oppidas, where an armed class apparently developed
devoted to no other job than such control in strategic locations. This might
be a paradigm for the "naming" of many of the so-called northern "peoples" we
see in prehistoric times, at least those considered worthy of note by ancient
writers.

regards,
steve long