Conflict at Europe’s Crossroads: Analysing the Social Life of Metal Weaponry in the Bronze Age Balkans

Abstract

This paper explores the character of weaponry from the western and central Balkan Peninsula, a region that constitutes a crossroad between Aegean and Urnfield Bronze Age metalworking traditions. The objective is to explore how a biographic or lifecycle approach to weapons including swords, spears, axes and armour may serve to understand the social venues in which ideas about style and function were exchanged and materialised. By briefly evaluating sample datasets for taxonomic-functional analysis, metalwork wear analysis, metallography, contextual research and experimental archaeology, the paper considers some avenues through which these disparate fields of analysis on the same forms of material culture can be considered effectively in complementary ways. The paper then briefly explores the conduct of combat practices and warfare traditions relevant to the Bronze Age Balkans. Ultimately, the intention of this paper is to bring together different approaches that place material culture studies at the heart of Bronze Age warfare research.