Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

Danube (IVe au IIe millénaire). While Deshayes’ monograph and other fundamental
works on metal tools provided a foundation for this project, several systematic research
trips to Greece, Cyprus and Turkey enabled the development of the extensive catalogue
through personal inspection of the objects. A description of the organization of this study
and how it proceeds is described below.
After this short introduction, there are five substantial chapters that form the
study. Chapter 2 highlights possible avenues for metallurgical research, while discussing
the selected methodology for the current project. The distribution, function/type, value,
context and assembly of implement groupings formed the structure of the project rather a
traditional typological approach. With each database entry, several classification choices
were made and these categories form the basis for the types of questions that were
queried with the data: functional category (carpentry or masonry, agricultural,
metallurgical, utilitarian, small craft, and ritual or prestige), geographic region, basic tool
size, context (burial, settlement, workshop, hoard, shipwreck, surface, or unknown) and
time period. These and other categories facilitated a quantitative investigation of tool
consumption, on a local and much wider scale, to reveal preferences that might not have
otherwise emerged.
Chapter 3 assesses the value of metal tools in pre- and proto-history and presents
the overall implement patterns by time period, region, and context. These observations
are discussed according to relatively well-defined functional tool categories. Agricultural
tools are rare in the MBA, but became popular implements in the LBA, primarily in
Cypriot and Syro-Palestinian contexts. Metallurgical implements are prevalent
throughout Anatolia, Cyprus and Crete, but they are scarce on the Greek mainland.
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