THE BRONZE AGE, THE ORIGINS OF EARLY EUROPE

At the end of the third millennium BCE, with the development of metallurgy and the need for new materials, the societies that currently occupy the Eurasian peninsula organised trade networks that had not existed before. Archaeological excavations conducted in Western Europe over the past twenty years are now shedding light on the economic and social relations that, until the first millennium BCE, structured the organisation of an early interconnected Europe consisting of a network of fortified sites, but also sowed the seeds of what would become capitalism.