Lines of Cultural Communication in Bronze Age France

IT is the assembling and exchange of ideas that make for progress. The continuous accumulation and assimilation of imported customs enrich a culture and in a well directed community lead, oftener than not, to a more stable civilization. Thus those areas that are situated at the meeting places of lines of trade and that receive newcomers and their goods by diverse land or sea routes may be expected to attain metropolitan importance. So it has been from ancient times. As early as the Bronze Age France showed examples of such regional focuses and of contrasting backward localities off the main trade routes. It is with these lines of trade as determined by the geographical position of France in relation to her borderlands and flanking seas and by the differing environmental circumstances of the Bronze Age within the country that we are concerned. Cultivation and herding were already established occupations when the Bronze Age opened. The probably resembled oftener than not the shifting cultivation of certain parts of Central Africa today: combined with herding it made for a seminomadic existence in the less forested regions. The grazing animals encroached slightly, but progressively, on the undergrowth of the forests and even on the young trees, thus preventing regeneration of the forests they attacked. Neolithic man himself probably did relatively little to destroy the forests: his flocks worked the damage. An increasing population gradually restricted the more favorable areas for seminomadic herding and tillage; and when metalworking, an invention of the Near East, came westward in Europe, continuous occupation of seacoasts along the trade routes of the Atlantic littorals and of inland areas of calcareous downland and sandy hillsides relatively free from dense forests was already established.' The two components of the alloy bronze are not always found in the same neighborhood. The bringing together of copper and tin in alluvial form (the value of the ore was probably not realized) and the consequent settlement of hitherto unexploited regions constitute the great achievement of the Bronze Age. It made possible an enormous variety of tools and weapons as compared with the preceding period when only polished stone and worked flint had been available for the same purposes. The manufactures together with the raw metals became the objects of a vigorous exchange along well defined routes

Ancient history · Archaeology · Bronze · Bronze Age · Geography · Archaeological and Geological Studies · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · History · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology

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