Sub-Project MC 8.2 Managing Early Bronze Casting in Central Europe

Project Leader: Philipp W. Stockhammer

This research focused on the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Central Europe as well as on methodology. Integrating radiocarbon dating and a transcultural approach to the developments between 2500 and 1500 BCE, the chronology of this period was re-written: the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in Central Europe had often been considered as a supra-regional uniform process, which led to the growing mastery of the new bronze technology. Since the 1920s, archaeologists have divided the Early Bronze Age into two chronological phases (Bronze A1 and A2), which were also seen as stages of technical progress. On the basis of 140 newly radiocarbon dated human remains from Final Neolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age cemeteries, the project proposed a significantly different dating range. The beginning of the Early Bronze Age was dated to around 2150 BC and its end to around 1700 BC. Moreover, there is no transition between Bronze A1 and Bronze A2 as it had been assumed since the early 20th century AD, but a complete overlap between the type objects of the two phases from 1900–1700 BC. Therefore, the project could demonstrate that the traditional phases Bz A1 and Bz A2 do not represent a chronological sequence, but regionally different social phenomena connected to the willingness of local actors to appropriate the new bronze technology.
Based on these new insights, the project also studied the process of appropriation of the new technology and the associated practices of innovation management. It analysed how early bronzes and their production were perceived and investigated in what way practices of coping with technology are recognisable and how the ability to produce quasi identical objects serially might have affected the lifeworlds of users and producers. For the area of the Únětice Culture where Bronze technology fell on fertile ground it identified religiously motivated mimetic practices of coping with technology. The novel serial production of quasi identical objects in large numbers and the simultaneously occurring practice of depositing large numbers of identical objects point to a specific new perspective of Bronze Age actors on their material culture. While the want to possess identical objects is already evident prior to the Early Bronze Age, the new technology allowed for ample realisation of this need. As a consequence of these insights, the project further studied the concepts of copy and seriality from an interdisciplinary perspective.