Bronze Age Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe

Author: Gimbutas M.
Bronze Age Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe
Paris, London: Mouton & Co
1965
Pages: 774
Format: pdf
Size: 42 mb
Language: English

"This volume should not be considered Part II of the author's Prehistory of Eastern Europe (1956). Since it was central Europe that played the formative role on the continent during the Bronze Age, the present monograph takes on a wider scope and is independent of the former book.
This monograph is meant for the student of European archaeology, not for the lay reader. This year is not yet the date for a fluently readable book on the Bronze Age of Europe to appear. We are in the period of a "gold rush" of discovery. The spontaneity of research and the increasing accumulation of archaeological material exists without being evaluated, analysis and synthesis always being behind the pace of excavation. My task, therefore, was to summarize and evaluate the first hand sources of about fifteen countries. I believed that drawing together as much information as possible in order to make the complicated cultural history of the second millennium B.c. more understandable, could not be postponed.
Unfortunately, the book must appear before the new dating techniques, particularly the Carbon 14 method, could become of wider use in central and eastern Europe, and before the results of the analyses of metal objects have been published. I release this work without the feeling that it is as I wished it to be, but in writing this sort of monograph I hoped to help the younger members of the family of archaeologists by making the heretofore unknown sources accessible and summarized in a familiar language, as well as bringing forward new facts, concepts, hypotheses, classifications, and labels."