Disruptive Economies and Macrolithic Technologies in the Euro-Mediterranean Bronze Age

Objective

Between 3000 and 1500 BCE, a relatively small number of Mediterranean and European societies underwent deep changes, leading to large-scale, centralised, and highly unequal economic and political entities. Most of these Early Bronze Age “innovative regions” are identified with the rise of a warrior elite or aristocracy, craft specialisation, agricultural intensification, and expanding exchange networks. What caused the rapid emergence and, centuries later, sudden collapse of these “disruptive societies” is one of history’s most important open questions, particularly in view of their triggering effect on the development of statehood beyond Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. CORNERSTONES will examine the economic factors underlying and connecting the rise and fall of Early Bronze Age disruptive societies by drawing on the heuristic potential of macrolithic tools. No artefact category of later prehistory was involved in a larger range of productive processes, from food processing to metal forging. Ubiquitous and plentiful, their numbers are directly related to production intensity, while their distribution reveals economic specialisation and centralisation. The limited attention so far paid to macrolithic tools in prehistoric archaeology is mainly due to the complexity of the required interdisciplinary approach. CORNERSTONES will meet this challenge with a set of innovative research tools from the fields of geology, material mechanics, functional analysis, ethnoarchaeology, and network analysis. New procedures and scientific standards will be combined in a comparative paleo-economic investigation of three of the most prominent Euro-Mediterranean Bronze Age contexts with disruptive trajectories: the Aegean Bronze Age, including Minoan Crete, the Únětice society in Central Europe, and El Argar in the western Mediterranean. This investigation is critical to the understanding of later disruptive processes and the economic challenges they represent for our own society.