The Political Economy and Metal Trade in Bronze Age Europe: Understanding Regional Variability in Terms of Comparative Advantages and Articulations

Abstract

In the second millennium cal BC, a new metal conquered Europe: the alloy of copper and tin that improved the quality of tools and weapons. This development, we argue, initiated a framework for a new political economy. We explore how a political economy approach may help understand the European Bronze Age by focussing on regional comparative advantages in long-distance trade and resulting bottlenecks in commodity flows. Links existed in commodity chains, where obligated labour and ownership of resources helped mobilize surpluses, thus creating potential for social segments to control the production and flows of critical goods. The political economy of Bronze Age Europe would thus represent a transformation in how would-be leaders mobilized resources to support their political ends. The long-distance trade in metals and other commodities created a shift from local group ownership towards increasingly individual strategies to obtain wealth from macro-regional trade. We construct our argument to make sense of available data, but recognize that our model's primary purpose is to structure future research to test the model.

Becoming Bog Bodies Sacrifice and Politics of Exclusion, as Evidenced in the Deposition of Skeletal Remains in Wetlands Near Uppåkra

“…The deposition of the lur drew the bog into relations with ceremonies and landscapes of sound, which as well as the boat, links into travels over distances and practices that were recognized in and connected to areas remote from Uppåkra. As indicated by Earle et al (2015) material signatures of bronze age artefacts give evidence for contacts across central Europe and the Atlantic sea. The composition of bronze artefacts such as the lur would have drawn on these networks.…”

The Provenance, Use, and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age: The State of Debate

“…At the core of this long-standing debate is the relationship between European Bronze Age metals and societies, which consequently have been the subject of much scholarship, especially as metals can be used as a proxy for populations, trade systems, conflict, religious practices, and institutional dynamics. Emphasis continues to be placed on the multiple connections between metal objects, metal trade, and elites (e.g., Earle et al 2015;Kristiansen and Suchowska-Ducke 2015;Vandkilde et al 2015).…”

Shifting Centres: Site Location and Resource Procurement on the North Coast of Cyprus over the Longue Durée of the Prehistoric Bronze Age

“…Elsewhere in the Bronze Age world, the expansion of extractive industries and an increase in inter-regional exchange provided opportunities for emerging elites to exert influence over the flow and production of metals and led to increasingly centralised hierarchical socioeconomic institutions [134][135][136]. Complex urbanised regional polities with institutionalised inequality certainly developed in Cyprus in the LBA, but mining, specialised production, and external trade started well before the MBA/LBA transition.…”

“…Some also show evidence for the manipulation of burial space and likely ritual activity, and for the caching, hoarding or accumulation of metal [57], [75] (p. 63), [77] (pp. [134][135][136], [145] (Figure 19). By the end of MC II, metal artefacts appear to have ceased to be valued as personal possessions in the burial domain.…”