Producing copper in the eastern Alps during the second millennium BC

Discussions of the organization of Bronze Age metallurgy have played an important role in studies of European prehistory for much of the twentieth century. From the 1920s onwards the Bronze Age was seen by Gordon Childe as the period in history when the contrast between the ‘dynamism’ of Europe and the ‘stagnation’ of the East, which had long been a staple of Enlightenment social philosophy, first began to develop.