Land of opportunity? Settling and social organization of the early corded ware groups in Central Jutland, Denmark

The breakthrough of aDNA research during the mid-2010s fundamentally shifted the dominant focus of research on the Corded Ware period in Europe, redirecting attention to questions about migration and the interdisciplinary integration of new and older approaches. Since then, the debate on migration in European prehistory has developed significantly, but previously central questions about aspects of social organization such as social stratification and gender roles during the Corded Ware period have yet to be fully reintegrated with recent aDNA-influenced perspectives. In this article, we combine these two areas of enquiry, migration and social organization. We explore the settling of migrant groups that arrived in a previously abandoned part of the Jutland Peninsula during the decades around 2800 BCE and the cultural system that they established there during the early Corded Ware period (2850–2600 BCE). By combining archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence, we document the establishment of a new socioeconomic system centred mainly on mobile pastoralism. We then turn our focus to expressions of (material) wealth and other aspects of status in burials during this period. We identify major differences in the ability to display material wealth within a corpus of 46 burials with a mortuary palisade from this period and that high levels of wealth display or ‘burial investment’ coincides with certain locations in the study area. We then discuss these patterns while also drawing in the use of red ochre and its potential role in asserting Eastern European ancestry among these newly settled groups – and perhaps towards neighbouring late TRB groups residing in the coastal zone east of the study area. Our article demonstrates the potential of regional, high-resolution case studies for understanding dynamics of migration, settling processes, subsistence strategies and aspects of social organization as well as their causal interplay in prehistoric societies.