I want to know:

Would they have been monogomous? (I need a 'yes')
Would man and woman have chosen each other? (I need a 'yes')
How would they have chosen each other and courted? (Dance? Prim and proper? Romp in the woods to check compatibility?)

Google has gotten me as far as "handfasting" but I need the lead up, the bit before they promise themselves to each other.

My only references at the moment are the Flintstones, and those cartoons where the man bops the woman over the head with a club and drags her off by the hair :-(

To be clear, in the hope of avoiding the creation of a thread of elevated temperature, I'm not asking whether ancient ways were right, moral or otherwise, but just what they might have been.

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Navajo Traditions
http://www.weddingdetails.com/lore/native.cfm
White corn meal symbolizes the male and yellow the female. The Navajo combine the two meals into a corn mush and put it into a wedding basket before the traditional ceremony.

The Navajo bride was an equal partner to her husband. The couple would share the maize pudding during the ceremony to symbolize the marriage bond.

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quote:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_people#Cultural_characteristics
Historically, the structure of the Navajo society is largely a matrilocal system in which only women were allowed to own livestock and land. Once married, a Navajo man would move into his bride's dwelling and clan since daughters (or, if necessary, other female relatives) were traditionally the ones who received the generational inheritance (this is mirror-opposite to a patrilocal tradition). Any children are said to belong to the mother's clan and be "born for" the father's clan. The clan system is exogamous, meaning it was, and mostly still is, considered a form of incest to marry or date anyone from any of a person's four grandparents clans.

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quote:

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Would man and woman have chosen each other?

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Oddly, I had some Navajo ideas in mind already, and searching on hunter/gatherers has led me to realize the story is actually set in the late bronze age.

Good to see you around again, Deb.

There are so many ancient cultures to choose from, perhaps the questions you should be asking are not "Would they have been <however>?", but rather "Could they have been <however>?"

Social mores develop because of the influences imposed by the environment in which a society exists, and (unless you're writing historical fiction about a known culture -- in which case disregard all of this) you have the freedom to shape that environment in such a way that it shapes the moral code your characters follow.

If you need monogamy in your story, provide an environmental reason for your characters to practice it. This can be done on many different levels; perhaps in your society's history, it was noticed that people who slept around died more often than people who did not. Plausible actual reason: STD. Reason plausible to bronze-age characters: The gods frown upon promiscuity and smite those who are not monogamous, and now it's religious law, despite the fact that the disease no longer exists.

-G