Some remarks on the cognitive impact of metallurgical development in promoting numerical and metrological abstraction in Europe

Abstract

If we accept the thesis that advanced metrological systems existed in Bronze Age societies, described and analysed as weight standards by many authors, we should also consider its simple consequence; these weight standards were the successors of earlier and rather simpler systems of value that developed within Eneolithic societies. Dealing with the issue of early metallurgy in Europe, some authors have traced patterns and proliferation cycles of copper for this period that allow us to see that the introduction of metal to the main regions in Europe was the subject of growth, spread, and changing social perspectives rather than a crisis in metal production and hiatus. This is the point, I think, at which we can embed one source of Bronze Age weight standards on the one hand, and earlier simpler methods of measuring copper, on the other.