Metals, Minds and Mobility

Integrating Scientific Data with Archaeological Theory

Xosé-Lois Armada, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso, Mike Charlton

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781785709067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Metals, Minds and Mobility seeks to integrate archaeometallurgical data with archaeological theory to address longstanding questions about mechanisms of exchange, mobility and social complexity in prehistory. The circulation of metal has long been viewed as a catalyst for social, economic and population changes in Europe. New techniques and perspectives derived from archaeological science can shed new light on the understanding of the movement of people, materials and technological knowledge. In recent years these science-based approaches have situated mobility at the forefront of the archaeological debate. Advances in the characterization of metals and metallurgical residues combined with more sophisticated approaches to data analysis add greater resolution to provenance studies. Though offering better pictures of artifact source, the explanation of artifact distribution across geographic space requires the use of theoretically informed models and solid archaeological evidence to discern differences between the circulation of raw materials, ingots, objects, craftspeople and populations. Bringing together many leading expert contributions addressing topics that include the invention, innovation, and transmission of metallurgical knowledge; archaeometric based models of exchange; characterization and discrimination of different modes of material circulation; and the impact of metals on social complexity. The 13 papers are organized in three main sections dealing with key debates in archaeology: transmission of metallurgical technologies, knowledge, and ideas; prestige economies and exchange; and circulation of metal as commodities and concludes with a review of current approaches, situating the volume in a broader context and identifying future research directions.

Chapter 1

Metals, minds and mobility: An introduction

Xosé-Lois Armada, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and Mike Charlton

The circulation and supply of metals have traditionally been considered a key issue in the analysis of social dynamics of late prehistory. However surprising it might be, there are not many books devoted to discussing the phenomenon with a broad perspective in geographical and chronological terms. Even in classic works on exchange and trade in European prehistory (e.g. Scarre and Healy 1993), metals have smaller incidence than one would expect. Although determination of a metal object’s provenance has been one of the main motivations of archaeometallurgical research almost since its inception (Pernicka 2014; Pollard et al. 2014), the impact of these studies in the general archaeological debate and reconstructions of the past has been limited. The low levels of communication between ‘archaeologists’ and ‘archaeometallurgists’ is, in Pearce’s opinion (2016), one of the reasons for this divorce.

Metals Make the World Go Round, a book edited by Pare (2000) that emerged from a congress held in Birmingham in 1997, may be the best-known collective work on the circulation of metals in the European prehistory. Its 18 contributions reflect the state of the art at the turn of the millennium. In particular, the book shows that approaches based on the typology and quantification of metals can be very clarifying if they are applied in an appropriate way. However, the use of analytical information is rather scarce, with only two chapters focused on compositional data and lead isotope analysis only present in the two contributions by the Oxford team.

The present volume emerges from a session held at the 21st Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Glasgow, Scotland, on September 2015, which aimed to integrate archaeometallurgical data with archaeological theory to address questions about past mechanisms of exchange, mobility and social complexity (session SA14, entitled ‘New approaches to metals trade and people mobility: Integrating scientific data with archaeological theory’).

This session was designed in a very specific context: the three of us had obtained a Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the European Commission at the UCL Institute of Archaeology (working at the very same office); our three projects dealt with metallurgy (copper, bronze or iron); all of them concerned with the circulation of metals in one or another way; all were supervised by the same scientist in charge (Marcos Martinón-Torres); and the three of us were using a range of archaeometric techniques despite of asking different questions and being derived from different theoretical approaches. This synergistic context gave us the opportunity to discuss the role of scientific techniques and the contribution of archaeometry to solve (or at least to add some light) on different archaeological and historical questions. That materialised into the organisation of the aforementioned session at the EAA conference in Glasgow.

Several longstanding and new questions arose at that session: the circulation and provenance of metals including tin and iron; the transmission of metallurgical knowledge; the characterisation of different models of exchange and material circulation and the application of new analytical techniques in the investigation of the archaeological record. The success of the session and the interesting discussions that followed encouraged us to go a step further by consolidating them into this edited volume. However, it bears mention that the book’s contents differ from the original session, as some participants were unable to contribute to the volume while a number of chapters have been written under invitation in order to have a broader coverage of topics.

The main aim of the book is to build a bridge between archaeological science and theory by bringing together theoretical and analytical approaches that, in our view, should be deployed together towards a common goal: the understanding of past societies. The circulation of metal has long been viewed as a catalyst for social, economic and population changes in Europe and these theories are rooted in the distribution of metal objects across time and space. In this sense, new techniques and perspectives derived from archaeological science can shed new light on the understanding of the movement of people, materials, and technological knowledge. In recent years these science-based approaches have situated mobility at the forefront of the archaeological debate (e.g. Kristiansen 2014), but surprisingly no overview of current perspectives on the topic exist at this moment. Advances in the characterisation of metals and metallurgical residues (including bulk elemental composition by XRF/pXRF, X-ray microanalysis, PIXE, ICP-OES and LIBS; trace elemental by NAA and ICP-MS and isotopic analysis by TIMS and MC-ICP-MS) combined with more sophisticated approaches to data analysis add greater resolution to provenance studies. Though offering better pictures of artefact source, the explanation of artefact distribution across geographic space requires the use of theoretically informed models and solid archaeological evidence to discern differences between the circulation of raw materials, ingots, objects, craftspeople and populations, plus the impact that this circulation could have had in social structures and vice versa. Full characterisation of metals circulation is essential to understanding its impact on social practices and the emergence of complexity and linguistic as well as cultural transfers of interacting peoples. In any case, the book does not pretend to be a systematic overview of the different theoretical approaches and methodological developments, but exemplify some of the hottest topics and discuss some intriguing possibilities of integrating scientific data and archaeological theory. Nor have we intended to be exhaustive in the chronological and geographic coverage, although the European and Mediterranean Recent Prehistory are our main focus, with occasional incursions in other areas.

Bringing together some of the world’s leading experts in the archaeological sciences and the archaeology of Europe and the Mediterranean, the book addresses topics that include: 1) invention, innovation and transmission of metallurgical knowledge; 2) science-based models of exchange; 3) characterisation and discrimination of different modes of material circulation; and 4) the impact of metals on social complexity. Alongside the introductory and concluding chapters, a total of ten individual chapters are organised in three main sections dealing with key debates in archaeology. Papers in the first section focus on the transmission of metallurgical technologies, knowledge, and ideas; papers in the second section deal with prestige economies and exchange; while papers in the third section emphasise the circulation of metal as commodities. This structure approaches the different perspectives that metallurgy and metals may have in society: as knowledge and technology, as prestige items, and as commodities. It should be emphasised, however, that these mechanisms of exchange and circulation do not constitute immobile or exclusive realities, but often worked as simultaneous processes within the same networks.

Metals and mobility in archaeological research: A diachronic view

Metals and metallurgy have been a central element in the development of models of historical explanation of humanity since the 18th century. The configuration of Europe as the economic center of the world generated a gradual transformation in European thought that favoured a stage-like evolutionary vision of the past and of History. The revolutions and scientific advances of the 16th and 17th centuries, their application to the development of technology, and the perception of the ways of life of the technologically less advanced peoples of the colonies generated a growing faith in Progress and in technological development as a motor of social advance; ideas formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It is precisely in this context that the scheme of the Three Ages – Stone, Bronze and Iron – begins to be generalised, since Mahudel firstly proposed it in 1734 in Paris recovering the classical sources of Titus Lucretius Carus (Trigger 2006, 104–05). However, it was the work of Ch. J. Thomsen and other Danish and Swedish scholars that popularised this scheme from 1835 onwards (Rowley-Conwy 2004; 2007). An evolutionary approach to the first development of humanity is thus generalised, with the emergence and advancement of technology and especially metallurgy as the major trajectory.

Although first composition analyses of metals by gravimetry date back to the late 18th century (Pollard 2015), it is in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the interest in determining the elemental composition of archaeological metals notably increases (Caley 1967; Müller and Pernicka 2009, 296–97; Liu et al. 2015). The objectives of these analyses used to be to investigate the casting technology or the sequence of use of the different metals and alloys (e.g. Marsille 1913, 24–26, 39–51; Siret 1913, 318–86, 461–66; Castillo 1927, 95–96). The issue of metals provenance was also frequently raised, although it faced the analytical limitations for determining trace element compositions (Pernicka 2014, 240).

At the end of the 19th century, the rise of nationalistic movements in Europe added a new factor to the study of the history of humanity: ethnicity. In this context, a reciprocal relationship between the growth of nationalism and that of archaeology itself is established (Díaz-Andreu 2007). On the one hand, advances in archaeology contributed to different peoples and ethnic groups a way to better know their origins and identity, and on the other hand this nationalist perspective places emphasis on the study of artefacts with the aim of differentiating the material cultures of each group, equating in the archaeological record material culture and ethnicity or society. As Trigger (2006, 218) pointed out, the loss of faith in progress along with the growing idea that human behaviour was biologically determined led to growing skepticism in human creativity, understanding that the condition of human beings was rather static, posing resistance, by nature, to any inventiveness or change that would imply an alteration in their way of life, their technology or their savoir-faire. This fostered the success of diffusionist theories since it was considered improbable that inventions (especially if they were associated with certain technological development and complexity) were given independently in several places and explanations of any cultural change would almost systematically resorted to theories of diffusion, migration or transmission of ideas from one people to another. The irradiating center from which the technological innovations were spread was located in the Near East: it would be Montelius’ Ex Oriente Lux.

This has been the case of the explanation of the origins of metallurgy in Europe. Vere Gordon Childe – whose ideas have been greatly influential in archaeological literature – placed metallurgical technology at the forefront of social change. He was one of the first authors to propose the origins of metallurgy and the first metallurgical specialists as major drives behind the rise of social division of labour, social elites and stratified societies (Childe 1956; see also Kuijpers 2018, 1–4). His intellectual prestige was key to enhancing the idea of the diffusion of metallurgy from the Near East to the rest of Europe (Childe 1930; 1939). Pere Bosch Gimpera, one of the most prominent Spanish archaeologist at the time and another good representative of this approach, stated in his well-known synthesis of 1932 that ‘metals trade provides the key to the explanation of everything’ when analysing the external relations of the Iberian Peninsula, although recognising immediately the complexity of the issue (Bosch Gimpera 2003 [1932], 241).

The development of emission spectrometry in the 1930s and its greater ability to determine trace elements gave rise, in the same decade, to the first systematic analysis programs of archaeological metals in Germany and England, in the latter case promoted by Childe himself (Pollard et al. 2007, 7–8, 64; Pernicka 2014, 240–47).

The idea of the origin of metallurgy in Europe through a diffusion process originating in the Near East was not questioned until the second half of the 20th century, with Renfrew’s famous isochrone map (Renfrew 1967; 1970) showing the earlier chronology of the Western megalithic phenomenon, and proposing the independent emergence of metallurgy in Western Europe (contra Wertime 1973). This change of paradigm was motivated by one of the most important developments in archaeological sciences in the 20th century: radiocarbon dating (Renfrew 1973).

The spread of the new processual paradigm (the American New Archaeology) since the late 1950s (Trigger 2006; Criado Boado 2012, 62–78), in which the consolidation of Renfrew’s proposals played a crucial role, fostered the development of archaeological sciences in their interest of making use of sophisticated quantitative techniques and ideas from other disciplines. Their disappointment with the descriptive tendency of the traditional archaeology led them to look into ‘real science’, where ‘proper scientists’ used quantitative data to contrast hypothesis and make gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Metals, minds and mobility: An introduction: Xosé-Lois Armada, Mercedes Murillo-Barroso and Mike Charlton
• PART 1: TRANSMISSION OF METALLURGICAL TECHNOLOGIES, KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS
• PART 2: PRESTIGE ECONOMIES AND EXCHANGE
• PART 3: CIRCULATION OF METAL AS COMMODITIES
• PART 4: CONCLUDING REMARKS