Discoveries: The Bronze Age in Europe

Achilles, Odysseus, and the other heroes of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey fought with shields and swords of bronze. What was the world like in those mythic days, when the rival Greek cities of Troy and Mycenae battled for supremacy, and, far to the west, unknown engineers raised the megaliths of Stonehenge? What do we know of even earlier times, when the settled peoples of Europe first replaced their crude stone tools with those made of refined metal, and crafted ornaments of beaten copper and gold?
Archaeologists date the Bronze Age in Europe from about the 5th to the 1st millennium BC. That span of time saw dramatic changes in civilizations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, and from Scandinavia to the Aegean. The discovery of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was remarkable technological development, permitting the casting of much stronger tools and weapons. Across Europe, the peoples of the Bronze Age forged metal and traded its products, raised monolithic standing stones, practiced similar funerary and religious rites, and decorated their products with the same motifs and symbols. From Cretan palaces to Swiss lakeside dwellings, a common culture arose. As they explore the epic of the Bronze Age, the archaeologists Jean-Pierre Mohen and Christiane Eluere take us back beyond the borders of history.