The Late Neolithic and Copper Age were a time of change in most of Europe. Technological innovations including animal traction, the wheel, and plow agriculture transformed the prehistoric economy. The discovery of copper metallurgy expanded the spectrum of socially significant materials and realigned exchange networks away from Neolithic “greenstone,” obsidian, and Spondylus shells. New funerary practices also emerged, signifying the growing importance of lineage ancestors, as well as new ideas of personal identity. These phenomena have long attracted researchers’ attention in continental Europe and the British Isles, but comparatively little has been done in the Italian peninsula. Building on recent discoveries and interdisciplinary research on settlement patterns, the subsistence economy, the exchange of socially valuable materials, the emergence of metallurgy, funerary practices, and notions of the body, I critically appraise current models of the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in light of the Italian regional evidence, focusing on central Italy. In contrast to prior interpretations of this period as the cradle of Bronze Age social inequality and the prestige goods economy, I argue that, at this juncture, prehistoric society reconfigured burial practices into powerful new media for cultural communication and employed new materials and objects as novel identity markers. Stratified political elites may not be among the new identities that emerged at this time in the social landscape of prehistoric Italy.

中文翻译：

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从意大利中部的新石器时代到青铜时代：金属生产黎明时的定居，埋葬和社会变革

新石器时代晚期和铜时代是整个欧洲变化的时代。包括动物牵引，车轮和犁耕农业在内的技术创新改变了史前经济。铜冶金学的发现扩大了具有社会意义的材料的范围，并使交换网络远离了新石器时代的“绿岩”，黑曜石和Spondylus贝壳。新的葬礼实践也应运而生，这表明世系祖先的重要性和个人身份的新观念日益重要。长期以来，这些现象吸引了欧洲大陆和不列颠群岛的研究人员的注意，但是在意大利半岛的研究却很少。在最近的发现和跨学科研究的基础上，我对现代新石器时代-青铜时代过渡的模型进行了批判性评估，这些研究涉及定居模式，自给自足的经济，具有社会价值的物质的交换，冶金学，fun葬实践和身体观念的出现。意大利地区证据，重点放在意大利中部。与这个时期以前作为青铜时代社会不平等和声望经济的发源地的解释相反，我认为，在此关头，史前社会将埋葬做法重新配置为强大的新媒体进行文化交流，并采用新的材料和物体作为新颖的身份标记。分层的政治精英可能不在史前意大利的社会格局中此时出现的新身份中。