As I wrote the other day one of the research-areas to be followed on this blog in 2007 is the ongoing work and re-exhibition of the Dejbjerg-wagons in the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen (see photo (from the 1970s exhibition) in the “Summing up”-post from Saturday). The museum is now (until spring 2008) working on a new-exhibition of the part concerning the danish prehistory, and during this work archaeologists have the possibility to reexamine the wagons from Dejbjerg Bog in western Jutland. 

The Dejbjerg-wagons, excavated in the 1880s, belong to a group of six wagons found in western Denmark, from Limfjorden to Funen. They are all made in a Pre-roman central European (La Tène) tradition with bronze-fittings decorated in a way not seen likely anywhere in the Danish Iron-age material. The iron-parts, e.g. the wheel-rings, is probably made of European iron, and the wagons themselves is made in a non-Scandinavian tradition, compared to the rest of the Danish Iron-age wagon-material. 

But does this mean these wagons were actually driven all the way from, let’s say, Bohemia or Schwitzerland just to be bogged down in Jutland?

I think the situation about the Dejbjerg-wagons and the rest of this group, might be a bit more complex than that. The Chieftains in the southern Scandinavian area can easily have traded the foreign iron and bronze-parts to their area, and if they could get the metal-parts then why not also the inspiration or maybe even the craftsmen to construct these luxurious central European wagons?

The work on the wagons belonging to the Dejbjerg-group (all of them, not only the ones in the National Museum) will be followed intensively and any progress in the work and republication of them will be reported here.