This dissertation provides a new coherent interpretation of the significant cultural and social development of the 3rd millennium BC. The 3rd millennium BC was a period of great change in most parts of northern and western Europe where new pan-European cultural phenomena changed Neolithic life and prepared the way for the appearance of Bronze Age societies. The great era of megalithic architecture came to an end as the production and exchange of gold, copper and bronze objects became the driving force in the development of Copper and Bronze Age societies. This development also had a great influence on South Scandinavia where the first Neolithic culture ceased and a period of great cultural heterogeneity began.
The dissertation focuses on eastern Denmark. This area in particular was characterised by a blurred cultural development that until now has been unexplained. Research on the 3rd millennium BC has mainly centred on single cultural groups, which has hindered an overall understanding of the development within the millennium. Unlike earlier research, this dissertation goes beyond the study of single cultural groups and analyses the entire 3rd millennium BC as one long transformation process.
Based on a new chronology and the study of artefacts, settlements, graves and hoards the dissertation shows that a high degree of continuity existed throughout the millennium. Concepts such as ethnicity, kinship and creolisation are crucial for understanding and explaining the widespread cultural changes that ended the kinship-based tribal structure of the Neolithic and led to the development of hierarchical Bronze Age societies.