FORGING IDENTITIES · Forging Identities: The Mobility of Culture in Bronze Age Europe

This ITN will continue and enhance the success of a recent RTN ‘The Emergence of European Communities (2-2001-00366)’: Several PhDs have been educated and new knowledge has been unearthed concerning the economic and political foundations of intercultural interaction in Bronze Age Europe – a golden epoch between 3000 and 500 BC with new patterns of social identification, specialised production, complex polities and wide-reaching interaction networks across Europe. However, new questions have been evoked: 1. How did cultural mobility impact on the social life of settlements? 2. How did the movement of people, animals, plants, things, ideas, and knowledge take place and on what scale? 3. How were European and regional identities forged through interaction? These and other questions – grown out of the preceding RTN – will be researched by building on a continued European network and by using a similar cross-disciplinary methodology combining archaeology, natural science and sociology. This shared platform shall create knowledge of the mobility of people and culture – including the new metal bronze – and insight into the forging of European and regional identities that shaped this remarkable period. The ITN is expected to change current archaeological perspectives from national traditionalism towards transnational and cross-disciplinary engagements. It consists of 7 network partners and 11 associated partners. Network partners have considerable capacities in research training and will provide supervision and facilities for the employed ESRs and ERs. They will cooperate with each other in organising workshops, training courses, and summer schools. Associated partners will provide extra supervision, field sites, data, and secondments offering specific training facilities in archaeology and front-line sciences. Field schools will take place each summer.