EARLY ITALIAN METALLURGY
talian metallurgy also shows marked influences from outside the peninsula. To the east of Italy, in the Balkans and beyond, complex and highly organized societies, ruled by kings with the assistance of bureaucratic and military elites, were firmly established in the second millennium B.C. The Mycenaean civilization of Greece exercised considerable influence on some of the cultures of central Europe and the central and western Mediterranean, motivated, at least in part, by the need to acquire metals. Mycenaean pottery appears in Sardinia, where copper was mined, as early as the fourteenth century, and there are clear signs of contact, probably through intermediaries, with the metal-producing regions of central Europe and Britain.
At this time, metallurgical techniques and styles came to exhibit a high degree of standardization over great distances and across many soci-eties, since the Mycenaeans’ search for metals seems to have encouraged a movement of craftsmen and of manufactured objects between the metal-producing and metalworking regions of central Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Most Italian communities, smaller and simpler economically, socially, and politically than their eastern contemporaries, probably participated in this world only peripherally. Exchanges fell off sharply when Mycenaean power began to fade in the twelfth and eleventh centuries.Outside influences did not affect all areas of Italy equally.
Mycenaean merchants and settlers were active along some of the coasts of Italy and Sicily: Scattered finds of pottery have been found along the southern half of the Adriatic shore, as well as along the south coast of Italy and its west coast as far north as the Bay of Naples, along the east coast of Sicily, and on the Lipari islands. In southern Italy and eastern Sicily, where relations were most intense, settlers from the east may actually have founded settlements. Here, local communities may also have imitated some aspects of Mycenaean social organization: A ruling war¬rior elite seems to have emerged in some communities, and in a few places larg¬er and more elaborate dwellings may indicate the presence of native rulers. Central Italy did not develop as rapidly or in quite the same way. During the Recent Bronze Age (roughly the thirteenth and early twelfth centuries), settle¬ments here grew in size and in number, an indication that the population was increasing; a typical village may now have had a population in excess of one hundred. The inhabitants of many settlements placed their dwellings on hilltops, presumably for reasons of defense, and occasionally they strengthened their position further with ditches and dikes, a practice that was less frequent earlier.