The Copper Age of Peninsular Italy and the Aegean

Abstract

Italy, like several other areas of prehistoric Europe, enjoyed a flourishing ‘Copper Age’— a period when objects of copper but not of bronze were in use, although not plentifully, and when various other changes in custom and material culture occurred, including transformations in the conventions of burial. These changes, like many in European prehistory, are often explained in terms of the ‘diffusion’ of ‘cultural influences’ from more advanced areas, notably the Aegean, or by the arrival of new groups of people from that region who would, it is sometimes thought, have set up ‘colonies’.