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Scoglio del Tonno (Taranto) is a settlement with a strategic location in one of the best natural harbours of the Italian Peninsula. During the Late Bronze Age it was an emporion, a privileged and permanent landing place for ships sailing between the Aegean and Italian Peninsulas. Crucibles and a number of metal artefacts were found during its excavation (1899( , Quagliati 1900Säflund 1939); this work reports the quantitative analysis of these metal artefacts by energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence. All are made of copper alloys except for one piece, an eyelet pin made of a gold-silver-copper alloy. The examination of these objects and the analytical data obtained help reconstruct the functions of this site. Metal was systematically accumulated at Scoglio del Tonno, presumably to be shipped towards the eastern Mediterranean. The site highlights the exponential increase in northern Italian metal production during the Recent Bronze Age (ca. 14 th -13 th c. BC). RESUMEN

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In the field of European recent prehistory it is generally agreed that, from the Early Orientalising period, Etruria played a central role in long distance trade, also acting as a link between the Aegean and east Mediterranean and trans-Alpine Europe. A widely acknowledged implication is that this primary status of the Etruscans among the indigenous peoples of Italy was a secondary effect of the Greek and Phoenician colonisation in the central Mediterranean. It is the aim of this paper to show that, as early as the Late Bronze Age, Etruria emerged as a complex territorial, political, and economic entity and was able to participate in an interregional network of trade reaching as far as northern Germany and the Aegean. By the beginnings of the Italian Iron Age, this region was organised as a federation of early states, with important extensions in the southern Po plain, along the Adriatic coast, and in Campania.

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