Metallurgical traditions in Bronze and Early Iron Age Mediterranean

Abstract

The exchange of different kind of metals, technology, skills and types from one side of the Mediterranean to the other is attested since the 3rd millennium BC. Ideas, skills, and technologies moved together with rough materials and smiths aboard of the merchant ships, according to the fashion and the trend of the time, creating at the mid of the Late Bronze Age the so-called metallurgical koinè. The orientation of the flow was mainly from East towards West, but it was not unidirectional