Metal Supply and Social Networks in the Irish Later Bronze Age

在整个青铜时代（公元前2500-800年），冶金是技术和社会变革的最重要推动力之一。当铜矿只出现在一些受严格限制的地理区域时，对铜的普遍和不断增长的需求形成了新的交换网络并建立了新的实践社区。在公元前3世纪末至公元前1千年初的过程中，一些现有铜供应来源的枯竭和其他铜供应来源的开放导致了区域和区域间社会经济互动的周期性变化。铜供应模式的这些变化通常与考古记录中更广泛的变化相一致。对于英国来说，这些发展的轮廓现在已经相当清楚了，但对于大西洋欧洲的其他地区来说，情况并非如此。特别是在爱尔兰的青铜时代晚期，我们仍然缺乏可靠的数据来帮助我们了解铜供应模式的变化以及支撑它们的社会网络。本项目旨在通过采用多学科方法解决这一差距。它将确定爱尔兰在失去其作为不列颠群岛铜主要供应国的作用后所消耗的铜的来源，并在此基础上重新评估爱尔兰在更广泛的区域和区域间社会经济相互作用中不断变化的作用。该项目还将为爱尔兰后期青铜器时代的金属制品和支撑其生产的铜供应模式提供一个更可靠的时间框架，这反过来将使我们能够评估这些模式的变化与考古记录中的其他变化之间的关系，这些变化涉及人口密度、土地利用和定居结构，以及控制关键经济资源和贸易的强大酋长型政策的出现。在这样做的过程中，该项目将有助于在更广泛的岛屿和欧洲范围内放置这些发展。

For the entire duration of the Bronze Age (c. 2500-800 BC) metallurgy provided one of the most significant drivers for both technological and societal change. The ubiquitous and growing demand for copper, when copper ores only occur in some closely circumscribed geographical areas, shaped new exchange networks and established new communities of practice. Over the course of the later 3rd to early 1st millennia BC, exhaustion of some existing copper supply sources and the opening up of others led to periodic changes in regional and inter-regional 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 other parts of Atlantic Europe. For the Later Bronze Age of Ireland in particular, we still lack reliable data that could provide us with insights into changes in copper supply patterns and the social networks that underpinned them. The present project aims to address this gap by adopting a multidisciplinary approach. 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 inter-regional socio-economic interactions. The project will also provide a more reliable chronological framework for Irish Later Bronze Age metalwork and the copper supply patterns underpinning its production, which in turn will allow us to assess how changes in these patterns relate to other transformations in the archaeological record, 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. In doing so, the project will facilitate the placing of these developments in a wider Insular and European context.