Matthew Walsh

The project entitled “Tracing cultural transmission by phylogenetic analyses” focused on Bronze Age oak-coffin burial traditions and their associated grave goods. The project sought to identify potential differences between cultural traditions related to these iconic Early Bronze Age burials using a combination of archaeological and geoarchaeological data. Utilizing new data generated by the “Tales of Bronze Age Women Project”, the research explored whether migrating peoples significantly brought their own cultural traditions – material or otherwise –with them from abroad as they entered new cultural landscapes in Northern Europe. It further investigated to what degree did individuals assimilate (or not) into the existing sociocultural traditions of their new homelands during this key prehistoric period in Europe characterized by long-distance contacts.

The project generated new insights into how complex cultural dynamics can be observed from the archaeological record and provided new ways of investigating the wealth of materials already extant in museum collections.

At the time of the project, Matthew J. Walsh was a post doc with the Tales of Bronze Age People project. He is currently senior researcher in Native American studies at the National Museum of Denmark.