Metals, Minds and Mobility seeks to integrate archaeometallurgical data with archaeological theory to address longstanding questions about mechanisms of exchange, mobility and social complexity in prehistory. The circulation of metal has long been viewed as a catalyst for social, economic and population changes in Europe. New techniques and perspectives derived from archaeological science can shed new light on the understanding of the movement of people, materials and technological knowledge. In recent years these science-based approaches have situated mobility at the forefront of the archaeological debate. Advances in the characterisation of metals and metallurgical residues combined with more sophisticated approaches to data analysis add greater resolution to provenance studies.
Though offering better pictures of artefact source, the explanation of artefact distribution across geographic space requires the use of theoretically informed models and solid archaeological evidence to discern differences between the circulation of raw materials, ingots, objects, craftspeople and populations. Bringing together many leading expert contributions address topics that include the invention, innovation and transmission of metallurgical knowledge; archaeometric based models of exchange; characterization and discrimination of different modes of material circulation; and the impact of metals on social complexity.
The 13 papers are organised in three main sections dealing with key debates in archaeology: transmission of metallurgical technologies, knowledge and ideas; prestige economies and exchange; and circulation of metal as commodities and concludes with a review current approaches, situating the volume in a broader context and identifying future research directions.
Contributors
1. Metals, minds and mobility: An introduction
Xosé-Lois Armada, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and Mike Charlton
PART 1: TRANSMISSION OF METALLURGICAL TECHNOLOGIES, KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS
2. On Europe, the Mediterranean and the myth of passive peripheries
Tobias L. Kienlin
3. Metal artefacts circulation in the Eneolithic period from southeastern Romania. A case study
Catalin Lazar, Adelina Darie, Gheorghe Niculescu and Migdonia Georgescu
4. On Quimbaya goldwork (Colombia), lost wax casting and ritual practice in America and Europe
Alicia Perea
5. Bronze production and tin provenance – new thoughts about the spread of metallurgical knowledge
Bianka Nessel, Gerhard Brügmann, Daniel Berger, Carolin Frank, Janeta Marahrens and Ernst Pernicka
PART 2: PRESTIGE ECONOMIES AND EXCHANGE
6. Unequal exchange and the articulation of modes of re-production
Michael Rowlands
7. Why was (and is) silver sexy? Silver during the 4th–3rd millennia in the Near East and Mesopotamia
Susan Sherratt
8. G old, conspicuous consumption and prestige – a relationship in need of review. The case of Early and Middle Bronze Age Crete
Borja Legarra Herrero
PART 3: CIRCULATION OF METAL AS COMMODITIES
9. Biography, prosopography and the density of scientific data: Some arguments from the metallurgy of Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland
Peter Bray
10. The role of pre-Norsemen in trade and exchange of commodities in Bronze Age Europe
Lene Melheim, Johan Ling, Zofia A. Stos-Gale, Eva Hjärthner-Holdar and Lena Grandin
11. Lead and copper mining in Priorat county (Tarragona, Spain): From cooperative exchange networks to colonial trade (2600–500 BC)
Núria Rafel Fontanals, Ignacio Soriano, Xosé-Lois Armada, Mark A. Hunt Ortiz and Ignacio Montero-Ruiz
PART 4: CONCLUDING REMARKS
12. Mobility, minds and metals: The end of archaeological science?
Marcos Martinón-Torres
Index
Colour figures
Xosé-Lois Armada is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, Santiago de Compostela. His research interests are in protohistoric metallurgy and its social interpretation, prestige objects and metals as an expression of power, ancient mining and metal as a motivating factor for interactions and social change on a regional scale
Mercedes Murillo-Barroso is a Marie Curie IE Fellow based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. Her research interests focus on social archaeology especially concerning the debates about the origins of metallurgy and its relationship with social inequality.
Mike Charlton is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, having received his PhD from the same in 2007. His research focuses on the integration of materials characterisation (especially analytical chemistry) with Darwinian approaches to archaeology in an effort to better understand the evolution of craft production and exchange systems as well as their interrelationships with other aspects of the social and natural environments
