 Thank you to everyone. First I just have to thank the organizer for accepting my paper and also for organizing this very interesting session. The paper I'm presenting today is based on some of the results from my PhD and it focuses on the reasons behind regional transformation in social-political strategies and this paper will present some kind of theoretical and also methodological concepts around this and how we try and identify them. Sort of a presumption or hypothesis is that the reliance and utilization of the sea set the stage for a more kind of advanced social-political organization and the technological innovations, specifically ship technology, helped turn this kind of the sea into a kind of connective arena of interaction and trade. And this is testified by the emergence of a very homogeneous material assembly in a fairly short period of time from the southern tip of Norway here, although up to the southern borders up there. So this is a stretch of coast that was roughly 1500 kilometers long or 800 nautical miles which is quite a large area and I would argue though kind of cautiously that there are very few areas in Europe where you do find the same uninterrupted homogeneous material assembly as you do here. And this is despite the fact that these societies are juxtaposed by a long coastline of climatic and ecological distinctiveness that would have forced insular practices in both subsistence and organization. Now what we see is the emergence of pressure flake technology, simple shaft hole access, metal objects of course, as well as homogeneous settlement practice in the form of longhouses, first two longhouses like this and later three longhouses. We also get burial rituals in the form of monumental burial mounds either as earthen barrows as you see here or as naked curns. Even though the material is similar over a large area we also see great variation in sociopolitical complexity both over time but also concurrently within the region. So the question sort of is how do we go about identifying this variation? Theoretical frameworks that are concerned with identifying a sociopolitical change are commonly kind of critiqued for being overly functionalistic, evolutionary in nature or generally ending up as a sort of checklist archaeology where you look at evolutionary stages. Now in attempting to move beyond these issues and towards a more eclectic approach I've drawn from a model frequently referred to as collective action theory where and collective action theory try and overcome this dichotomy between more functionalistic approaches and more post-modernistic agents but also this theory has been critiqued and sort of ineffectiveness in explaining why certain groups of people act in a certain way and how power strategies actually change and overlap within the region. Now I try to work around this issue by implementing a classic idea of processes of categorization illustrated with this model here but maybe I just made everything more confusing but I think the point I'm trying to make is that over regionally the entire coast is circumscribed within this sort of homogenous material assembly as I mentioned. A frequent communication would have created this sort of ductic mode of behavior or this taken for granted way of thinking but as I will come back to in my case studies there are still quite different levels of social political organization happening here shown here through two extremes either recursive strategies or cooperative strategies. Both strategies though are developed through their independent factors but they are limited by the local ecology, landscape, resource and subsistence potential as you see here. Now for example in order for a coercive strategy to be initiated you need kind of an established political economy with the control of resources and the persuasive abilities to make people believe that such an organization actually is necessary but you also could have like cooperative strategies where active choices are made in the way groups decide to act. However for the Northwestern Scandinavia at least a major reason why groups act in a certain way lies in their restrictions and or opportunities that is circumscribed by the local ecology or landscape. And the second deciding factor is process of categorization which means that power strategies are actualized through the categorical processes one group has over another and vice versa so if one group exercises coercive strategies this will undoubtedly have an effect on neighboring groups and this will in turn act depending on their natural limitations either through coercive strategies or through alternate strategies. So increase categorization is of course a kind of result from increased communication and travel along the sea way. So that was just kind of my theoretical backdrop but how do we go about identifying regional change within a large region that is as I've said now based on the material assembly quite similar. Now an extensive archaeological corpus consisting of settlement and burial patterns, lithics, metal and rock art were incorporated to identify patterns of diachronic, regional and societal differences. Though working with such a large body of data one kind of requires the way to systemize it and here a combination of the statistical to RIPLIS K function and kernel density estimation in ArcGIS has proven quite fruitful. A RIPLIS K function kind of calculates a different point data multiple times from different distance bands giving statistical significance to clusters of the different fine categories. Now by looking for statistical clusters diachronically over a large area regional concentrations and dispersions become missable and although you know this can only be used as statistical readings and not proof of actual cultural groupings they do provide the sort of staging ground for more in-depth studies of regional variation change. So based on these readings you get kind of an sort of an objective demarcation of areas of activity and variation over time which can be used to identify regional groupings. Here you see a chart of the accumulation of the various data sets in each region over time from the late Neolithic down to the end of the early Bronze Age. Here it's just kind of very rough map illustrating different regions of activity. So again this is helpful to some extent but it does not reveal anything about variation in social political organization. To do this we need to go more in-depth and I will try and exemplify this through very briefly through two case studies in Ossogne and in Kaume. So in Ossogne has a highly mixed subsistence based on the local ecology and as you can see from this kind of psychedelic map here there's multiple vegetation zones within an extremely short area of each other and this enables both seric cultivation, seasonal pastoralism and extensive hunting grounds for hunting. They were definitely part of an inter-regional trade network seen through the material assembly but what is interesting is that there's very limited evidence here of a more kind of hierarchical organized society but there are definitely access to early metal commerce. The second region, here in Kaume has a much more restricted subsistence based on the local ecology and all the settlement sites in burial mounds are located on the outer crest here in this one vegetation zone. The region here is definitely part of an inter-regional trade network. There's strong evidence of a hierarchical organized society here. There are dozens of these monumental burial mounds and a rich burial assembly. There's early metal commerce here as well but what is interesting is it accumulates slightly later than what we see in the end of some. There's this paradox here between these two regions. One has plenty of available resources at their disposal but has limited evidence of hierarchical organized society. The other has few available resources at their disposal but a strong hierarchical organized society. Why is that? If you start by looking at Yaren Kaume, this is an example I think illustrates really well how Bronze Age society is capitalized on natural bottlenecks in a world where people have become more and more dependent on trade. Now control of strategic areas like harbors and straits sort of necessitates this legitimization of wealth and property and one way to manage this is through an alleged hereditary system which is witnessed at Yaren Kaume through long-term settlement sites an erection of dozens of monumental burial mounds a very strategic location as this was straight here at the Kaume. This creates what I've termed a coercive strategy or a coercive society. It's a region dependent on control of trade. It's a system built on coercive strategy but they also tend to be highly unstable because it creates increased competition between groups and creates its dynamic or more oscillating societies. Now the other region in Osong is an inner fjord district which has very few possibilities to capitalize on strategic location in the same way as the coastal areas and effective exploitation of the many resources here can at first glance seem difficult in a region with a fragmented landscape and a seemingly low population. Now on the other hand a cooperative strategy offers obvious advantages for communities that are lacking in certain resources like having a low population and few strategic bottlenecks. A well-organized community based on selective task would allow them for increased sustainability and potentially also lower risks. It may also provide easier access to an interregional kind of market which again could give them a competitive advantage over region exercising after the strategies. So in the case of in Osong interest such as just simply biological reproduction of subsistence optimization may have helped create a dependent system that was also highly stable. Now other motivating factors include access to dominant trends like metal of course and despite being relatively self-sustaining by exploiting multiple resources through cooperation, specifically pastoralism and hunting, communities may have been able to intensify and optimize their production which would have allowed them to kind of position themselves within an interregional political economy. To serve just to sum this up, the sea is seen as a kind of the structuring element and creation of this complexity. However centralized groups or chiefdoms were established by capitalizing natural passageways. But what is interesting is these are particularly visible in coastal areas around 1500 BCE and onwards. But what I argue is that they definitely were reliant on surplus from the subsistence economy from the peripheries like pastoralism and hunting. And these are particularly visible from around 1950-1500 BCE. So thank you for your time.