Academic archaeology of the Bronze Age
Review of The Making of Bronze Age Eurasia by Philip L. Kohl
The book begins with an exploration of the Chalcolithic (i.e. Copper) Age (5th to 4th Millennium BCE) that saw a huge trading area based on farming in the Balkans and western Anatolia. With most mining needs available locally, there was a flowering of proto-urban areas with the birth of royal and economic hierarchies as evidenced by graves, beginning with metal working as luxuries and progressing to staple technologies, which diffused quickly through the trading network.
For unknown reasons (perhaps climatic, probably not military), Chalcolithic culture collapsed suddenly, as bronze (from copper-arsenic and the copper-tin alloys) came into wider use. This required the development of extensive trade networks, first for metals available only in certain mines and later for elite luxury trade. This became the era of the citadel.
Starting from mid-4th millennium BCE, a crude pastoralist culture developed in the Pontic Caspian area, essentially poor herders of cows with clunky wagons, searching for pastures. This cultural spread was gradual, over hundreds of years, and involved the absorption/assimilation/emulation of the emigrants of the agricultural societies they entered. There is very little evidence that this process was violent.
During the 3rd Millennium BCE, the horse was domesticated and hitched to better vehicles, such as chariots, which enabled scouts to look for better pasturage on wider ranges as well as develop military raiding parties. While the author mentions that these may have been the Indo-Europeans (also called the Yamnaya-related people), he is cautious to identify them since there were no written records. He also emphasizes that artifacts do not necessarily coincide with ethnic/linguistic groups.
During this expansion, as in the Chalcolithic Age, proto-urban areas arose that may have been loose coalitions of cooperation in metal trade, defense, and the development of agricultural technologies. While they were not as "advanced" as their contemporaries in the fully urbanized Mesopotamia and had not yet developed writing or sophisticated architecture, they were open to innovations that they both absorbed and produced. In particular, this time saw the expansion through Iran into India (2nd Millennium) and there were huge areas in which organized hierarchical power of some sort developed.
The final breakdown of the Bronze Age occurred gradually (12th-10th Century BCE), during the transition to the Iron Age. Once again, the causes are disputed, i..e. warfare, sea raids, the collapse of trading networks as copper and tin no longer needed to be united, social revolution, etc.
That is it for the gist of ideas, which are very interesting. However, there are long passages that are dry, going over obscure grave sites or academic debates on causes, etc. These proofs can be skipped or skimmed. I also wanted to know more about language differentiation and what the culture was like, but the author convinced me that this cannot be conclusively known from the archaeological evidence. There is also an awful lot about Soviet archaeologists, complete with mini-bios that I did not need. But these are minor criticisms.
This book covers, at high undergraduate level, the cutting-edge archaeology of the Bronze Age from the Balkans to the Indian subcontinent. It is well written and has many good maps and striking images. Though I was hoping for more on Europe, this is a fun read for those interested in a substantive general introduction.