Kristian Kristiansen 60 The Rules of the Game. Decentralised Complexity and Power Structures Kristian Kristiansen Chapter 5 Introduction In this chapter I propose that the Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia offers a uniquely preserved and well-analysed archaeological database for highlighting important aspects of what I will term decentralised complexity. By this I mean societies that display many of the traditional diagnostic features of ranking and complexity, such as conspicuous consumption of wealth, specialisation, long-distance trade in metals, warrior chiefs and retinues, complex rituals and religious iconography on metalwork and in rock art. Yet, we do not find large settlement centres with monumental architecture and other traits of the centralised exercise of power, nor do we find any signs of urbanisation. Monumentally and power is instead expressed in the structured use of landscapes by placing barrows on high points that visually connected all settled areas, and by constructing stone cairns and carving religious images along the rocky sea shores of Sweden and Norway, that connected maritime sailing routes with their coastal settlements (Ling 2004; Nordenborg Myhre 2005). In this way an interconnected world of cosmological and political endurance was created, which persisted during 1000 years, and its monuments still today characterise many landscapes in southern Scandinavia. While we have recently seen critical debates and interesting research on the complexity of urbanisation and early states (Trigger 2003; Yoffee 2005), the history and dynamics of those societies that during the later prehistory of temperate Europe exhibited a different form of complexity have not been subject to the same degree of theoretical reflection (but see Earle 2002; Harrisson 2004; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005). Here, the notion of decentralised power structures can assist if we wish to understand how complex power structures may operate in a decentralised social and economic environment that lacks many of the attributes of more clear-cut stratified societies. These normally evolve in environments where high productivity in nodal areas can be controlled and monopolised, whereas decentralised complexity normally operates in environments where productive resources are widespread and difficult to control from a single centre and are sometimes called the Germanic mode of production (Gilman 1995), wealth finance (Earle 1997), or prestige goods economies (Kristiansen 1998, Figure 128). The differences between the two types of social