In February I went to the USA for the first time, to the Lutheran University of Thousand Oaks near Los Angeles, California. I was asked to speak about the Nordic Bronze Age as I am a specialist in metalwork and can also shed light on the question of why Bronze Age people wore horned helmets.
It is always an honour to be recognised as an expert, and spreading the news that the people of the North had trade networks across Europe 3000 years before the Vikings is one of my missions. I participated in the 26th Nordic Spirit Symposium with a talk about the bronze horn helmets from Viksø and the long-distance networks of trade and exchange that prepared the arrival of such an object.
But it was the talk I gave the next day, about the fantastic metalwork created by Danish craftsmen 1500 years before our time, that impressed the most! The traces on these beautifully decorated objects allow us to trace individual craftspeople! Even more, it allows us to trace people´s lives. And this impressed the journalist of the The Norwegian Amerian a lot (see below).
Dr Heide Wrobel Nørgaard 