I am a Danish based specialist for crafting and production traces on metal with an expertise in analysing ancient metal objects. I work with archaeological and scientific methods to understand changes in technology. My background as a goldsmith allows me to see and understand the traces of craftsmanship on prehistoric metals. My scientific approach to archeology, the archaeometallurgy, allows me to prove the processes identified.
I aim to reveal the crafting processes behind the creation of metal artefacts using photography, metallography and elemental scientific methods. I am fascinated by the interpersonal networks that arise through trade in the necessary raw materials and the impact this has on technological development. In order to define these networks, in recent years I have focused primarily on methods for determining the origin of metals.
Instagram picture gallery @heidewrobelnoergaard
Research Highlights
Horned helmets symbolise a warrior ideology in Bronze Age Europe
January 2022
Horned helmets are not a Viking Age brand! This news filled the Archaeological News in the winter of 2022. The reason for this press storm was an article by a research team from Aarhus University and Moesgaard Museum, to which I also belong. This article published a C14 date of a sample of organic material I took from the horn of one of the helmets during a craft technical investigation. Additionally, the article provides a detailed network analysis of the iconography related to horned helmets and some ideas as to how the similarity between Scandinavia, Sardinia and Iberia could be understood.
Reports of this research can be found at the Aarhus University news feed, in Science, LiveScience, CNN, the New York Times, Daily Mail UK and videnskab.dk.
Bronze Age Scandinavia’s trading networks for copper settled
June 17, 2021
For the first time, it was possible to map the trade networks for metals and to identify changes in the supply routes, coinciding with other socio-economic changes detectable in the rich metal-dependent societies of Bronze Age southern Scandinavia.
A crystallographic structure of a prehistoric bronze from Sardinia wins 3rd prize in the DNRF’s Photo Competition 2021
March 30, 2021
by Argiro Hay Baltzis
New Open-Access Book on Bronze Age Metalwork
Nov 22, 2018
“Heide Nørgaard has produced a work of
exceptional quality, scholarly value, and
beauty. While it is somewhat difficult to
conceive of this last descriptor when considering the majority of archaeological
volumes on crafting and technology, this
volume is indeed spectacular not only in its
scholarship but in its vivid presentation of
Bronze Age metalwork.” MATTHEW J. WALSH -UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
Dr Heide Wrobel Nørgaard 