I am beginning to research the Norse Bronze Age, and I am limited to things available in the English language. I have found a singular book, "Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings" by Price T. Douglas and put that in my shopping cart. While expensive it seems the only comprehensive study in English of this earlier age. Any other books you can suggest on Norse Pre-History would be very much appreciated.
Anyway on to my main line of questioning. In my researching of the Nordic BA I randomly came across a video of this Barry Fell guy from the 70's and 80's who was apparently pretty heavily criticized for his unprofessional methods and sensationalist delivery. There is an old book by him called "Bronze Age America" I was thinking of putting in my shopping cart, that basically expounds on his findings as explained thoroughly here (skip the old sermon bit in the beginning, it doesn't last long and has nothing to do with the actual presentation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtRs4ImSJI0
The video shows the Peterborough Petroglyph, which I knew nothing of previously. It shows an interpretation of the various glyph images as being an early Thor, and one, Yggdrasil. It also shows Barry Fell translating them, and part of his transcription is: Woden-lithi, of Ringerike the great king, instructed that runes be engraved. A ship he took. In-honor-of-Gungnir was its name …. For ingot-copper of excellent quality came the king by way of trial
Now then, being /AskHistorians and not /AskPrehistorians, I hope to be cut some slack here if this type of conjecture isn't typically focused on.
Bonus points, why can one not take pictures or cameras into the building now surrounding the Peterborough Petroglyph? They say for spirituality purposes on a reference page on wiki... That led me to think this was either pushed under a rug or actively difficult to research further into...
TL;DR Is this still being studied? Refuted? Confirmed?
As /u/textandtrowel points out, Fell's hypothesis requires several things to exist hundreds, if not thousands of years earlier than we have evidence for.
On the Native American side of things, there's a reasons the petroglyphs are thought to be a thousand years old at most. That's pretty much the cut-off for all well-preserved petroglyphs in the Great Lakes region. People were almost certainly making petroglyphs here well before that, but the Great Lakes area is notoriously bad at preserving such features. For these to be 3000-2000 years old would require miraculous levels of preservation.
The book by T. Douglas Price looks good. Price is a professor emeritus (i.e. retired) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He specializes in archaeological chemistry, and I'm familiar with work that he's done on Viking-Age skeletons, identifying isotopes in them that reveal where a person grew up, what they were eating, etc. It's one of the most exciting areas in archaeology right now, and Price is at the front of it. Because he has a technical specialty and a deep knowledge of isotope patterns across Scandinavia, he's brought into a wide range of projects. So because he doesn't specialize in a particular period, I think he's uniquely qualified for writing a wide-ranging prehistory of Scandinavia. Also, Oxford University Press is a highly regarded academic publisher, which helps affirm the quality of the work (but also results in its high price). You can page through some of the book online, to see if it's for you.
Regarding the Barry Fell stuff: It's absurd. His interpretation of the Peterborough Petroglyph might make sense for the Viking Age—but it makes no sense for the Bronze Age. Old Norse was not yet a language; the cults of Thor and Odin had not yet developed; and Scandinavians weren't yet writing in runes. All these things developed during the Iron Age, about 2000 years later or more.
If you're interested in how these things developed—aspects of Scandinavian society on the cusp of the Viking Age—I'd point you to Hedeager's Iron Age Myth and Materiality and Roesdahl's The Vikings. I really like Hedeager's book, which looks at how Norse mythology developed in the 5th and 6th centuries. That's fairly well accepted, but Hedeager argues that it resulted primarily due to contact with the Huns. This is an old argument, and Hedeager has brought new life to it, but she's been critiqued for ignoring developments around the North Sea, connections to the Mediterranean, and some of the deep history of Scandinavia itself—contexts which help us see the Huns more as a catalyst than as a singular cause. Roesdahl's book, on the other hand, is fairly canonical. It's a bit outdated, but her vision has really shaped the ways in which we understand the Viking Age, so I think it's still a good quick and easy primer.
Bonus points, why can one not take pictures or cameras into the building now surrounding the Peterborough Petroglyph? They say for spirituality purposes on a reference page on wiki... That led me to think this was either pushed under a rug or actively difficult to research further into...
Dagmara Zawadzka writes in the article The Peterborough Petroglyphs/ Kinoomaagewaabkong: Confining the Spirit of Place.
Since 1998, at the request of Indigenous Elders, photography has been prohibited at the site as “[i]t is believed that camera and video steal the spirit of the rock” (Parry 2000, 55; Government of Ontario 2006, 5).
The local indigenous group is the Ojibway, an Anishnaabe group. The Curve Lake First Nation are caretakers of the site. As they note on their website, Kinomaage-Waapkong (The Teaching Rocks) is an active sacred site for their people.
There's a very bad 20th century history of archaeologists/anthropologists/historians vandalizing and profaning indigenous sites, looting cultural and sacred artefacts, stealing human remains, photographing people and rituals without consent, and generally writing/speaking in an offensive way of the peoples they study. The Curve Lake Nation's partnership with Ontario Provincial Parks is an example of how we can begin to go forward from this past. Curve Lake makes a point of welcoming people to the site, the opposite of sweeping it under the rug. The ban on photography by tourists has no impact on academic study. There are extensive photographs and reproductions of the petroglyphs, including photographs of the petroglyphs outlined in charcoal by previous researchers. The petroglyphs are open to anyone to see in person, and I'll point out, are protected from the constant vandalism/spray paint that are a huge world-wide threat to petroglyphs.
The ongoing research on these petroglyphs is in the context of Canadian shield indigenous rock art. The Peterborough Petroglyphs are the largest site of their kind, but there are hundreds of such sites throughout Ontario and Quebec. There's really no point in trying to decode one set of petroglyphs, without reference to the larger set and the indigenous knowledge and ethnographic records that can help inform our understanding of the petroglyphs. Daniel Arsenault and Dagmara Zawadzka are academics writing about Shield Rock Art if you're interested in current work.