Interactions-Transmission-Transformation: Long-distance connections in Copper and Bronze Age of the Central Balkans

THE FLOW
(Interactions-Transmission-Transformation: Long-distance connections in Copper and Bronze Age of the Central Balkans) project aims to address the long-distance connections in the Copper and Bronze Ages of the Central Balkans, as one of the key issues in the studies of mobility and migration in European late prehistory. Its premise is to contextualize the presence of a set of artifacts made of copper, obsidian, ceramic, and bronze, which have been commonly considered in isolation, to evaluate the complex links between production based on locally available raw materials and imported objects/raw materials from other regions.

The core of the project is the fact that the territory of the Central Balkans is home to numerous Eneolithic (Copper Age) and Bronze Age (4500 and 1000 BCE) artifacts, whose stylistic and typological features and distribution have marked them as imports from distant territories. Ceramic vessels whose forms and decoration are not typical for the Central Balkans and local archaeological cultures have been recorded on numerous sites.

The goal of the project is to determine if the mentioned artifacts are really of “foreign” origin or represent local imitations of models from distant areas and other archaeological cultures, which would indicate the existence of a significant degree of cultural interactions during the Copper and Bronze Age.

The project is focused on artifacts made of copper and bronze, and the determination of the origin of obsidian and raw materials for pottery production by utilizing different provenance methodologies, such as isotopic analyses, analyses of elemental composition of different ores and clays, and the analysis of the structure and the technology behind the pottery production process. The project is currently working with more than 800 samples from 67 archaeological sites.