 Yn ystod, Christian i mewn gwirionedd y cyfnod ymdweithio'r bobl ar hyn o'r cyfrannu argynnu ar y Cyfnod Ynys, fel y gyrdeithio'r dros y Lleidio Lleidio, yn ddwy'r medd, ond mae'n… y dyw eich gweithio, dyfodd, mae'n ffordd yn ymryddiant ar y dyfrannu, mae'n ysgrifennu'r gyfnod a'r rhywbethau ar y ddod, yw'r cyfrannu'r gweithio ar yr ysgrifennu'r gyfnod, iawn o'r wych yn oed yn rhai ar y argyffenol yn rhoi gwahanol a gweithio'r chrystleonol i'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o ddechrau'r mynd. Mae'r ffordd o'r cyffredin o'r cyffredinol, mae'r ffordd wedi dechrau'r ffordd o'r Pwysig a'r Sartonau, ffyrdd y chyfodd o'r ffordd o'r senodol, yn phobl o'r cyffredinol yn fferd o'r leidio'n teimlo i'r leidio y bron. Mae'r ffordd o'r meirio'i'r ffordd o'r ac mae'r cyfnodd ychydig wedi bod yn byw'r ddod yn gwybod i'r cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfeirio y gallwch yn teimlo i'r cyllidau ymlaen yn dod, a'r cyfeirio yn ni'n meddyl, ond rydyn nhw'n gwybod i'r cyfnodd. Rwy'n gweithio'n gyfnodd ar gyfer y dyfodol, rydyn ni'n iddynt i'n gwneud ymwneud o'r cyfrifolau ar gyfer Argymethologau, ac yn oed yn cyfrifolau ar gyfer ar gyfer ar gyfer ar gyfer Argymethologau, ac yn cyhoeddwch i ddechrau, ac mae'n cael ei bod yn ymweld i gael y mae'r ysgol, i gael ymddangos Corsica a'r Alps, y dyfodd meddwl yma yng Nghymru, ac mae'r neud yn eu cyfnod yma'r ymddangos cyfnodiol yn cymryd yn gael yng Nghymru arall o'i amsgol ar gyfer y ymddangos ar gyfer argymian y clyweddau ar y time. Felly mae'n gweithio ddim enw i'w gweithio allan o'r pwyntiau, neu rwy'n gweithio o'r gwych yn unig, ac mae'n gweithio ymlaen o'r bys. Mae'n gweithio'n meddwl i'r ddweud yma sydd yma yma, yma, lle mae'n meddwl o'r cyd-gweithio'n meddwl, ac mae'n meddwl i'r mynd i'r migau hynod yn 1990, ac mae'n cyfnodolau yma sydd yn methu. Mae'n meddwl o'r meddwl. A bydd eich meddwl. Felly, ddwy'n meddwl yma yma yn ymddangos, ar gyfer yma yma. this was published in 2001 a bit later. Back in the early 2000s, that was still kind of the framework, that was still the agenda. For most people at least, not perhaps everybody. And this is an image of the chronology, or typed chronology if you like, of chocolate and early bronze age metal tools from the North a central Italy as well, which are the two main areas for methodological innovation and production in this period. Publish in 2001, it was grounded in a proposal that dates back 30 years earlier, back to 1971, and using a method, chrono-typology, that had remained fundamentally unchanged since the early 20th century. Compare the two, please. Obviously, this is a different kind of chart, but it is underpins, but these kind of typo-chronological schemes for pottery, for metals, especially. So the sequence, the Italian one, as well as Gordon Charles of course, is not tied to absolute chronology, as radiocarbon was largely ignored at the time. Still, most people believed that the first methodological horizon, this lever you see here, was late, mid-late, third millennium BC, and all the rest was early Bronze Age, and the third beginning of the second millennium BC. As we will see in a moment, this was all dramatically wrong. And we've learned this in the last 25 years, of course. So in the last 25 years, we really had a quantum leap in the study of early metallurgy all over the region, and this was made possible by new research collaborations between archaeologists and material scientists, as well as new cross-border collaborations, which led to fresh questions and the renewal of the research agenda overall. Major strides were made in four areas. I want to talk about briefly now the chronology, of course, of early metalworking and metalusing, early copper mining, smelting and metalworking technology, and metal procurement and exchange. So let's start with the thorny chronology issue to get a sense of how things have changed or of late. The application of radiocarbon to metalwork reached burial sites has demonstrated that copper production did not kick off in the third millennium BC, as most people believe at the time. Not all of them are actually pleased to see some of the naysayers in the room here, but in the late fifth millennium BC, late or finally, allythic, and this was followed by a major surge in metalwork production in the mid fourth millennium BC, which is really captured by a deluge of naysayers. This is just a few, it was published in 2010, but we have many, many more radiocarbon days now. I think there's a deluge of radiocarbon dates calibrating in this range, right in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, that there was a surge in metal production and metal use at this time, the early copper age. By the end of the fourth millennium, metalworking and metalusing was well underway in most of the region, with the exception of Sicily and Malta, perhaps because these islands lie some distance away from the copper sources. Just to get a sense of what the copper sources are, this is a very approximate map of the location and relative size, I mean it's exaggerated of course, of copper sources we have two important regions in the southeast and out, Trentino, Tarigel and Tuscany, and then a scatter of sources in the out north and up in Ainsa, Corsica, Sardinia of course, and a few minor sources in Calabria, and one in northeastern Sicily. We don't know whether these were exploited at the time. It's interesting to see how early metallurgical cultures dated to the copper age overlap with these copper sources and normally as we have also in the rest of Europe, there's quite a good overlap of these cultures, or funeral traditions in some cases, overlap or develop, if you like, quite close to the old sources, with one notable exception, which is of course gallant income and the gallant culture, which is quite metal rich, is quite far from metal sources. We don't know yet where the copper used by these guys came from, perhaps Calabria, but there's no work being done and this is actually one of the questions if you like for the near future. I just want to go through important discoveries made in the last 25 years in terms of mining sites. This is all stuff you know very well. Just mentioning some of the most important sites that were discovered, published in the last two decades, of course Libiola and Montelerato in Licuria, but also sent on in the French Alps, which is a late 30s millennium BC mining and also smelting site, and Grotto de la Monaca in Calabria. These sites overall demonstrate the antiquity and scale of copper procurement in central Med. In central Med, very much that survival of these mining sites is very much hit and miss very often. What survives is the unimportant, the minor sites, those important sites were actually all the prehistoric activity was destroyed by later, opencast or even just historical mining. As far as copper smelting goes, considerable research was carried out in the South Eastern Alps and also in Tuscany. In the Alps, research by Gilberto Artioli and his team, and I'm just showing some of the publications that came out from the Padua team in the last 10, 15 years. This is an important piece of research that's clarified that had to smelt iron copper sulphides, such as Chalper pirate, for example, were efficiently smelted in the Alps from the third millennium BC. By the late second millennium, at the late Bronze Age, the technology was so advanced that copper was mass produced in complex operations involving extensive manpower, massive fuel consumption and a carefully controlled operational sequence. Things are less clear for Tuscany. We don't have not nearly the amount of research done on the early Tuscany sites, but I just want to show an important book that perhaps not all of you know that came out recently about San Carlos smelting site, fourth millennium smelting site in the Tuscany, Collina metaliferia, which has revealed a surprisingly advanced reduction technology involved in the smelting of several ore types at this domestic site, and the technology is so much more advanced than anything practiced in Europe at the time that we need further research to understand the broader implication of these discoveries. It's just the beginning of future work that must be done on these and other Tuscany sites dating to the fourth millennium. The last two decades also saw the application of lead isotope analysis for the first time, which is a metal-provenancing technique to regions other than Sardinia and to problems other than Oxide Ingots, which generated a lot of attention earlier on. Again, Artioli and his team researched chocolate and early Bronze Age metals from northeast Italy, and they argued that with few exceptions, most notable perhaps being the Iceman's axe that copper used to make this axe seems to come from Tuscany, not the local sources, but overall, by and large, these objects were made of copper coming from Trentino all to Adige, so these highlights exchange networks of regional scope. Interestingly, a different method, not necessarily a provenance thing, I'm not going into that, but if you're familiar, this is the so-called Oxford system, which charts the changes in alloy composition over time for assemblages of metals, was also applied to this region, to the Alps. So it's a slightly different method that looks at similar problems, although the overlap is not complete. It also looks into recycling methods over time. Its application revealed that in the Copper Age most metal objects were procured, exchanged and consumed locally, in self-contained small circulation spheres. The reaction in alloy composition decreased in the early Bronze Age, pointing to exchange and admixture within broader circuits in the western, sorry, this is eastern of course, and western Alps respectively. And tin bronze also first emerged in this period, with tin moving independently from the copper, but interestingly following the same east-west split. Markably, the split does not follow the Alpine watershed, but cuts it in half from the Swiss plateau to the Po Valley, cutting across physical, this is the tin line, with more tin on this side and less tin on the other side. It cuts across physical geography and a navigable river system, of course, with the Po Valley. So culture, not nature dictates metal exchange in the prehistoric Alps as well as northern Italy. So we're not presenting briefly a very personal summary of what's boiling in the pot right now, and with an excuse that you can only present unpublished research north, we take this opportunity to blow our own trumpets to some extent. So research, hot of the press, things happening right now, but not quite yet published, not quite yet in the public domain. We start with chronology, which is all of Christiano's work. He researched this stuff in a recently concluded Marie Curie Fellowship at Newcastle, and he approached the problem of chronology, the chronology of these artefacts, which is highly debated, from a new angle combining every view of greater carbon data from metal rich sites, a critical reclassification of early metalwork enhanced by weather analysis, looking at manufacturing technology and transformations of these objects of time, and the reassessment of typological links with central and eastern Europe. The results, which we are in the process of publishing right now, have defied expectations, I have to say. The research brought down the evidence into a much more detailed sequence than previously available. Previously we had, if you like, a three-period separation with copper age, early, middle and late copper age, but very often metals were genetically dated to the copper age, and some were debated if it was copper age or actually early bronze age, so it was a bit of a mess. Now we have a clear classification scheme, a quite detailed one, the periods lasting just a few centuries. This is a major breakthrough for understanding the evolution of metal technology in the whole of Italy, not just the north of the centre. So Pristianos charted regional trends, as well as chronological trends in the evolution of metal technology, which were hidden by the cause, or partly incorrect chronology. The most important one I want to flag up here is that after a common start of late Neolithic, horizon one right at the top is late Neolithic, in north and central Italy, there's a common start at that period, the two regions north and central Italy went their own ways, divergent trajectories in the fourth millennium with metal production booming in the centre, in the mid fourth millennium early copper age, but actually disappearing almost in the north, and ongoing research is trying to clarify if this is a visibility issue, so of course these metals were by and large used for burials, so any change in burial practices just hides all the metals, so that's a possibility, but all a real thing, if this is actually a hiatus, which of course we have north of the Alps in this period, was actually happening in the southern Alps at the same time, that's a distinct possibility. Right, moving on. Another Marie-Thierry project I'm supervising right now in Newcastle looks at the function of early European digas by experimental archaeology and micro-analysis, and this is one of the first projects cutting across this quite sharp disciplinary divide separating flint and metal tools, at least in use-ware analysis, and research fellow Isabella Caricola is now analysing flint and metal digas in a comparative fashion including, it's a broader project than just Italy, but it does include digas from Italy, both flint and metal. Finally, I want to present results of a recent project examining the provenance and circulation of 20 copper age axes, digas, and halvets from central Italy, which combines object chemistry and lead isotope analysis, and this should be out in early next year. The research showed that while about the sample is small, just 20 objects, and about 15 of these, as perhaps was expected, were made from copper, likely originating from Tuscan. Tuscan is very rich in copper, so this is not a surprise. The surprise really is that other objects, about four, come from further fields from the Western Alps, and one might actually come from France, from the massive central region, so the data, this is quite surprising and clearly warrants further research with broader samples, but the data also suggests that copper exchange, at this time, followed three largely independent networks. The first is the terrain and sea, and the Western Alps, perhaps stretching into France with a question mark at this stage. The second in the south eastern Alps and adjacent regions, mainly northeast Italy, and the third in the north eastern Alps, stretching into the Balkans. Perhaps because of their location, the three historic communities located in modern-day Switzerland could tap into the three networks at the same time, reaching out on occasion, as far as France, Tuscany and Serbia, which actually demonstrated that the Swiss got it right since the third millennium BC. We will now try and gaze into the crystal ball, and this is wrapping up my presentation now, and see how future research is shaping what needs to be done most urgently to fill knowledge gaps in this region. It's a very brief overview of what I think are the two or three most important areas we need to research and develop in the next 5 to 10 years. The first set of questions concerning early metal technology and artefacts. You'll be pleased that chronology is not here. I think it's very much a job done, as far as me and Christiana are concerned. Anyone want to join in, they're welcome, but we've done a bit for King and Country. The first set of questions concerning early metal technology and artefacts and especially smelting and metalwork technology south of the Alps, we know very little about still. We have a good understanding of how copper was extracted in the Alps, but this surprising discovery of very advanced smelting technology in 4th millennium Tuscany has generated urgent questions about the timing and about the nature of this technological leap forward. One of the pressing questions for me is this discovery, or if you like massive improvements in extraction technology, has any bearing of the development of early metal working in the rest of Europe? In other words, if they discovered a good way of smelting copper-sled fights and passed on this innovation to other regions or perhaps we could have independent discoveries elsewhere. These are the big questions for me. The second set of questions regards metal procurement and exchange. Again, most of the research focusing on the Alps, Tuscany and Sardinia after this time, it's now time to complete the isotopic map of Italy. We know nothing about south of this area. In Italy, there isn't much in terms of copper sources, but there are some in France, in Sicily, some in Lazio that haven't been fingerprinted yet. We need to do more to complete the isotopic map of Italy. After all, some of these minor sources could have been really important in prehistory, so we need to research that. Equipped with the new map, we should make an effort to trace exchange networks across time and geography, using not just lead-ice analysis, which is an important method that comes with its own limits, but also the conceptually different Oxford system as it to complement and validate each other. Perhaps the most important challenge, however, lies in the need to re-socialise metallogy using science and archaeology to address social questions within the big social questions like lying at the heart of prehistoric research. For example, what was the social context of early metal-making and use? What was the role of metalwork in the transformation of prehistoric society? Perhaps can we finally move away from catch-all explanations involving prestige goods and social elites, which may work well for the Bronze Age, I would argue not so well, perhaps for the late Neolithic and Copper Age, and propose, especially for these earlier periods, alternative models to make sense of early metalwork. Here we maintain lies of one of the greatest challenges for the next 25 years. Thank you very much for your attention.