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

metal was utilized by a society and gives an indication of how much was in circulation.
Yet several parts of this study will be improved with future work.
First of all, the catalogue compiled here is intended to be as comprehensive as
possible but with each year there are new finds and publications that will augment the
current list. The data presented from the Aegean, Cyprus, and Anatolia is relatively
exhaustive, but the information from the Levant has not been investigated as thoroughly
and the assembly of tools from the region principally came from Deshayes’ dataset.
Additionally, tool industries from three important areas peripheral to the study region
were not explored. Egypt, the central Mediterranean (including the Italian peninsula,
Sicily and Sardinia) and the Balkans were in contact with several core study areas during
the second millennium, particularly in the LBA. 844
The implements of these three regions
would provide additional data with which to analyze metal tools from the vast and
interconnected pre- and proto-historic Mediterranean world. Furthermore, the current
study has focused upon carpentry and masonry tools, and more attention should be given
to the other functional tool categories in future projects.
Statistical analyses were useful for identifying tool similarities among different
hoards as well as for differentiating certain kinds of tools and their subtypes based upon a
length-over-width ratio. It is recognized that these calculations merely scratched the
statistical potential of the current database, and a more thorough statistical investigation
of the tool data would be useful. For instance, statistical measures may demonstrate
regional and localized (site-by-site) variations of a single type of implement.
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Of these three regions, Deshayes included the Balkan tools and emphasized their connection to
Mycenaean types.
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