Over the course of the later 3rd to early 1st millennia BC, exhaustion of some of the existing copper supply sources and the opening up of others led to periodic changes in regional and interregional socio-economic interactions. Often these changes in copper supply patterns align with wider transformations in the archaeological record. For Britain, the outline of these developments is now reasonably well understood, but the same does not hold true for many other parts of Atlantic Europe. For the Later Bronze Age (LBA) (c. 1500-800 BC) of Ireland in particular, we still lack reliable data that could provide us with insights into changes in copper supply patterns.
The central point of this project is based on the fact that Irish copper sources dominated the supply of that metal across the British Isles for much of the Early Bronze Age (c. 2500-1500 BC), but with the exhaustion of the respective ore bodies and concomitant decline of Irish copper mining, Ireland lost its position as a net exporter of copper and from the mid 2nd millennium onward would have had to import most of the copper feeding its domestic metalwork production. This is despite the fact that metalwork production and consumption continued to increase throughout the Irish Later Bronze Age.
The present project aims to address this gap and by undertaking an ambitious multidisciplinary programme of archaeometallurgical and radiocarbon dating analysis, it will:
- Establish the sources of the copper consumed in Ireland after the island lost its role as the main supplier of that metal in the British Isles, and on this basis will reassess the island’s changing role in wider regional and interregional socio-economic interactions;
- Provide a more reliable chronological framework for Irish Later Bronze Age metalwork and the copper supply patterns underpinning its production. The close integration of state-of-the-art archaeometallurgical analysis and scientific dating methods will allow us, for the first time, to combine minor/trace-element and lead isotopic “fingerprints” of Irish LBA metalwork with a radiocarbon-based chronological framework for reliably dating changes in the copper supply patterns inferred from the statistical analysis of these “fingerprints”.
This, in turn, will enable us, again for the first time, to assess the relationship between changes in copper supply patterns and other major transformations in the archaeological record of the Irish LBA. Data will shed remarkable light on the mechanism that led to changes in the archaeological record, in particular concerning population density, land-use and settlement structures, as well as the emergence of powerful chiefdom-type polities that controlled crucial economic resources and trade.
This multi-analytical approach will trace new connections between Ireland, the wider Atlantic world and the rest of Europe, innovatively allowing us to reassess the role of a peripheral region such as Ireland within this/these network(s).
The project will thus contribute significantly to the ongoing international debate on interconnection and interaction between LBA communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.