The Antiquity of the One-edged Bronze Knife in the Aegean

Abstract

In the west we are accustomed to walking on bog, we therefore learn to tread light, seeing around us, but just out of reach, the contours of a more solid landscape. We have sequence and relative chronology, but if we tread too heavily, feeling for the subsoil of absolute dates and historical nomenclature, we are apt to flounder, if not to sink. Nevertheless in some places the bog has shrunk exposing solid, rock-like dates, dates that belong to a subsoil of history in a continent already mapped. As such we are concerned with the discovery of those false stepping-stones that lie deceptively on the surface of the bog. In the disclosure of the true rocks and exposure of the false, Gordon Childe has led us for long.One may preach on almost any subject from a text in The Dawn of European Civilization: I am however more concerned at present with the paper written in 1948 for these Proceedings in which Childe reviewed the beginnings of the Late Bronze Age north of the Alps, and the nature of the connexions between temperate Europe and the Near East at that particular moment, and especially as shown by a number of bronze ornaments, implements and weapons. More interesting still was the suggestion of a possible link between the exploitation of metal in the eastern Alps and the last phase of prosperity of the Minoan-Mycenaean world just before its collapse with the repercussions of that collapse.