The missing link: Re-theorising the role of Sardinia in a global political economy between the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe

• This paper presents The Missing link project financed by Swedish Research Council1, which will be running between 2021 and 2025. The aim of the project is to investigate the role of Sardinia in the metal trade between Scandinavia, Atlantic Europe, and the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. Growing evidence for metals of Sardinian origin in artefacts from different parts of Europe invite new ideas about maritime networks and the role of the western Mediterranean as a metal producing region. Following from that: what was the role of Sardinia in such a maritime network? And how did the production and exchange of metals unfold between Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean? Sardinia produced rich evidence for settlements and for a social complex organisation during the Bronze Age. At the same time and despite well-known difficulties for the chronological determination of the finds bronze figurines and model boats suggest, among other things, both maritime enterprises and a martial culture. Important work has been done in terms of the spread of Sardinian pottery. Several studies have also evidenced the likely presence of metal of Sardinian origin all over the continent; however, we need to support such evidence with more systematic, science-based documentation of the distribution of objects and metals of Sardinian origin throughout the Mediterranean and beyond paired up with a renewed attention to the isotopic fields of the various Sardinian mines. This invites an interdisciplinary approach; the goal of the project is to apply lead isotope and chemical analyses of metal artefacts and metal ores, as well as to carry out investigations to shed light on evidence of Sardinian copper mining. Finally, we wish to position Sardinia in the wider European and Mediterranean trade networks during the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. We suggest that Sardinian actors may have played a crucial role in the wider political economies of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic seaboard towards the end of the Bronze Age.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Arkeologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- Archaeology (hsv//eng)

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)