War and peace between Mycenaean Greece and Bronze Age Italy: Historic conclusions on the basis of archaeological research and archaeo-metallurgical research

This archaeological-archaeometric project is conducted by Reinhard Jung in collaboration with Mathias Mehofer (VIAS – University of Vienna), Ernst Pernicka (Curt-Engelhorn-Centre Archaeometry, Mannheim, Germany) and Ioannis Moschos (Pátra, Greece) as main collaboration partners. Numerous other partners, especially from Greece and Italy, are also involved. The project is financially supported by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory (INSTAP) in Philadelphia, USA, in 2007 and 2008. It complimented the stand-alone project on the cultural, economic and political contacts between the Aegean and Italy from 1600 to 1000 BCE, funded by the FWF – Austrian Science Fund (Project P 17912, 2005–2007) and conducted by R. Jung at the former Mycenaean Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The aim is to assess the nature of contacts between late Mycenaean Greece and Bronze Age Italy on the basis of new data on metallurgical production and the exchange of finished products. The material basis of the project are the chemical, mass spectrometric and metallographic analyses of metal objects made of bronze, copper and lead – in detail 49 artefacts from Italy, 89 from Greece, one from Austria and two from Egypt. These finds comprise both well-known old finds and new discoveries at modern excavations that were documented and evaluated for the first time in this project.

The results of the project will be published as a monograph. Part of this monograph will be the historical and archaeological evaluation of the results by Reinhard Jung (submitted as a habilitation thesis in 2012). Contributions on the results of the analysis (R. Jung, M. Mehofer, E. Pernicka), the metallurgy (M. Mehofer) and contributions on the various finds and their archaeological context by the respective excavators or analysts in Greece and Italy will complement the volume.