Bronze Age Metallurgy

This volume presents contributions from the international workshop ‘Bronze Age Metallurgy: Production – Consumption – Exchange’ held in Vienna in May 2019. The conference was organised by the former Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology (now Department of Prehistory and West Asian/ Northeast African Archaeology, Austrian Archaeological Institute) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and VIAS (Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science, University of Vienna) on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Archaeometallurgical Laboratory at VIAS. The main goal was to gather renowned experts in Bronze Age mining archaeology and archaeometallurgy and to discuss recent developments and results concerning the production and use of copper, trade and exchange of raw materials and alloying practices in areas of central and southeastern Europe. Altogether, 19 conference papers were presented, reporting on research achievements and new results on Bronze Age metallurgy in the territories of present-day Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia and Switzerland. Nine of these are presented in this volume; they provide an excellent overview of the new results on Bronze Age metallurgy in the Balkans and most of the neighbouring regions. The results of new analyses, excavations and systematic studies presented here extend our understanding of metallurgical processes at regional and supra-regional levels during the Bronze Age.