Battleaxes: Home-made, Made to Order or Factory Products?

Many scholars have claimed that the stone battle axes of the Battle Axe Culture were status objects with a social rather than a pratical function. One way of investigating this is to study the context in which the battle axes were manufactured, and by whom. If any object is to serve as a mark of status, it must be possible for someone who wishes to assert his/her superiority over other community members to limit the object’s availability. This limitation may involve a rare raw material, unusual knowledge about its production, time consuming or labour consuming production, etc. My work aims at analysing a number of possible prehistoric status objects, among them the battle axe, in order to ascertain the organisation of the production. This may in turn be related to the organisation of society