ABSTRACT

There were really two major zones of Bronze Age civilization in the West, each with a metal economy based on its own sources of copper and tin, with precious metal besides. The south-western consists mainly of the Iberian peninsula, the north-western embraces North-West France-above all Brit­ tany-and the British Isles. In between, the use of metal for long continued to make little headway, so that while we shall find important incomings from Central Europe into France on the east, much of the country, especially the old megalithic regions of the south and west, remained until a late date with an economy that can only still be called Chalcolithic. To take the Iberian zone first, the peninsula has been seen to be one of the richest and longest-known metalliferous regions in Europe. But whereas the abundant copper-and the precious metal-of the south formed the chief economic strength of the civilization we have seen centred in Almeria,

tin is only to be had in the north. Its chief abundance is in the north-west (p. 292), where its discovery by the people of the megalithic tombs, bell-beakers, and rock-carvings noticed above (p. 188) may have been due to its occurrence together with the copper they were already exploiting, as in Central Europe, or in the North Portuguese rivers where they probably conducted washings for alluvial gold. But there is little to show for any early importance of North-West Iberian bronze, and in fact the Almerian south long maintained in its Bronze Age the use of the unalloyed copper it had so much closer at hand. There appears, however, to be a little tin together with copper in the hinterland of Catalonia in the north-east, where we have seen an Almerian element early encroaching into the so-called Pyrenean culture (p. 166), and the first recognition of the value of tin-alloyed bronze may have been promoted on this side of the peninsula through contacts with bronze-using centres further east. Since the Aegean let its old sea -jrade with the Iberian West languish altogether with the rise of Middle Minoan civilization at the end of the third millennium (p. 152), it is more natural to look for such contacts with North Italy, where Spanish connexions in the Remedello culture (p. 247) had been reinforced by the expansion of the Bell-beaker people, by way of Sardinia, here at just about that time (p. 253). The Italian Bronze Age succeeded to Remedello on the strength of its own tin supply; its bronze output soon reached markets not only northward across the Alps but westward to the Rhone and South France, and since South France has produced also some Early Bronze Age objects of Spanish type, there may have been Italian-Spanish connexions this way, even though indirect. In any case, even apart from the Bell-beaker people, there was a certain back­ ground of cultural parallelism between the Spanish and the Italian Chalcolithic. Mention has already been made of the fine flint-work which characterized both cultures (pp. 161, 247), and among the finest Iberian flint weapons are those triangular blades fashioned for hafting at right angles to a wooden haft which are conventionally known to archaeology as halberds. This type of weapon probably descends from very ancient beginnings in the south and west, in deer-ander

picks and their stone and flint-bladed equivalents such as we have already connected with the derivation, in a sense a parallel process in the east and north, of the shaft-hole axe (p. 223). And whether or no flint blades were mounted in this way in Italy, the Remedello culture certainly had among its copper weapon-types one which seems to be the local counterpart of the metal halberds that are now to meet us in Iberia.1 The continuation of the halberd in use into the Italian Bronze Age is attested by its depiction in the famous rock-carvings of the Monte Bego, close behind the Riviera coast on the French frontier, and by a number of actual bronze halberds, and while the paramount influence here was the trans-Alpine diffusion of the weapon in its Irish-derived form, to be discussed shortly, North Italy has yet produced one example (from Frosinone in Tuscany) answering to the Iberian type. But this is little enough: obviously in the main Italy and Iberia drew apart in the Early Bronze Age; and since, of the intermediate islands, we have already seen that Sardinia, connected as it was with South France, did no more than cross contributions with Spain in the purely insular megalithic culture of the Balearic group, the Iberian Bronze Age can really only be considered in isolation-an isolation only otherwise modified by certain Atlantic connexions with the North-West along the old-established sea-route.