Abstract
The Late Neolithic and Copper Age were a time of change in most of Europe. Technological innovations including animal traction, the wheel, and plow agriculture transformed the prehistoric economy. The discovery of copper metallurgy expanded the spectrum of socially significant materials and realigned exchange networks away from Neolithic “greenstone,” obsidian, and Spondylus shells. New funerary practices also emerged, signifying the growing importance of lineage ancestors, as well as new ideas of personal identity. These phenomena have long attracted researchers’ attention in continental Europe and the British Isles, but comparatively little has been done in the Italian peninsula. Building on recent discoveries and interdisciplinary research on settlement patterns, the subsistence economy, the exchange of socially valuable materials, the emergence of metallurgy, funerary practices, and notions of the body, I critically appraise current models of the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in light of the Italian regional evidence, focusing on central Italy. In contrast to prior interpretations of this period as the cradle of Bronze Age social inequality and the prestige goods economy, I argue that, at this juncture, prehistoric society reconfigured burial practices into powerful new media for cultural communication and employed new materials and objects as novel identity markers. Stratified political elites may not be among the new identities that emerged at this time in the social landscape of prehistoric Italy.
Highlights
In much of Europe, the late fifth to the late third millennia BC was characterized by four sweeping changes that fundamentally altered the fabric of Neolithic society (Broodbank 2013; Heyd 2007; Kristiansen 2015; Robb and Harris 2013; Whittle 1996)
Specialists have frequently interpreted the new data in light of well-trodden narratives that stress the inevitable rise of social inequality, focusing on the appropriation of metals and other prestige goods to naturalize chiefs’ claims to power and, for some authors, the right to transmit it to their offspring
The idea that the long-distance trade of valuable substances would legitimize political power is problematic in the context of prehistoric Italy
Summary
In much of Europe, the late fifth to the late third millennia BC was characterized by four sweeping changes that fundamentally altered the fabric of Neolithic society (Broodbank 2013; Heyd 2007; Kristiansen 2015; Robb and Harris 2013; Whittle 1996). He argues that a novel emphasis on weapon burials, high rates of skeletal trauma, and the expansion of drystone defensive architecture would further highlight intercommunity friction in a fast-changing social landscape It is unclear if this reading may apply to central Italy given the lack of recent, theoretically informed research into Copper Age pottery styles in the region. There might be a hitherto underestimated chronological element to the changes in settlement patterns, with permanent villages becoming rarer in the late fifth and fourth millennia BC and growing again in the third millennium BC, possibly due to new farming technologies that enabled population growth (see below) This is something that future research and radiocarbon dating ought to clarify. Rather than being the cradle of social inequality, I maintain, this period might be better understood as a turning point in the development of new cosmological beliefs and ideas of the person, laying the foundation for the Bronze Age world
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call