Book Description

This volume presents an attempt to argue the role of metals in the history of Greek society using the widest possible variety of sources: the evidence of ancient writers, epigraphical material and archaeological data: the excavated remains of workshops and hoards, archaeometallurgical finds; the results of studies of ancient mines and analyses of ancient metal objects: bronze plastics and jewelry articles, coins etc. The main task of this work is to analyse the role of various metals in the context of Greek economic life, politics, culture and art, to trace the movement of metal from ore to finished the objects, including works of art, to show the relations between the regions where metals were extracted and the centres of metalworking, the structure of the workshops and the connections between them and the role of the workshops in the economic life at the different stages in Greek history. The chronological frame of the study is the 8th-1st centuries BC, i.e. from the beginning of the Great period of Greek colonization till the end of the Hellenistic epoch. The geographical frame of the work is the Greek oikumere.