Sub-Project Innovation Management – Bronze Age Entanglements between Asia and Europe (MC 8.2)

Project Leader: Philipp W. Stockhammer

Innovative bronze casting was first introduced to Central Europe in the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BCE and also to China only shortly afterwards. The Near East started alloying copper and tin already in the early 3rd millennium and developed a sophisticated casting technology. All three regions during the Early Bronze Age were integrated into far-reaching exchange networks. The early tin exploitation in Central Asia and in Western Europe provided vital links between the Near East and China on the one hand and the Near East and Central Europe on the other. Together with the introduction of bronze casting, highly interesting societal transformations took place in all three regions: firstly, the formation or strengthening of power imbalances within late 3rd and early 2nd millennium societies; secondly, the development of rituals and strategies devoted to managing this innovation. Thirdly, elite burials and hoards throughout Central Europe and China are repeatedly furnished with an enormous number of weapons and/or weapons for display. The appearance of these phenomena should be seen as the result of entangled knowledge between the different regions of Eurasia. The appropriation of foreign technologies seems to have been the driving forces for the development of new social practices and ideas at the beginning of the Bronze Age.