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THE MAKING OF BRONZE AGE EURASIA
This book provides an overview of Bronze Age societies of Western
Eurasia through an investigation of the archaeological record. Philip L.
Kohl outlines the long-term processes and patterns of interaction that
link these groups together in a shared historical trajectory of devel-
opment. Interactions took the form of the exchange of raw materials
and finished goods, the spread and sharing of technologies, and the
movements of peoples from one region to another. Kohl reconstructs
economic activities from subsistence practices to the production and
exchange of metals and other materials. He also examines long-term
processes, such as the development of more mobile forms of animal
husbandry, which were based on the introduction and large-scale uti-
lization of oxen-driven wheeled wagons and, subsequently, the domes-
tication and riding of horses; the spread of metalworking technologies
and exploitation of new centers of metallurgical production; changes in
systems of exchange from those dominated by the movement of luxury
goods to those in which materials essential for maintaining and securing
the reproduction of the societies participating in the work
panied and/or supplanted the trade in precious materials; and
increasing evidence for militarism and political instabilities as reflected
in shifts in settlement patterns, including increases in fortified sites and
quantitative and qualitative advances in weaponry. Kohl also argues
forcefully that the main task of the archaeologist should be to write
culture-history on a spatially and temporally grand scale in an effort to
detect large, macrohistorical processes of interaction and shared devel-
opment.
Philip L. Kohl is Professor of Anthropology and Kathryn W. Davis Pro-
fessor of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of The
Bronze Age