Our technological enquiry into the beginnings of European metalworking can now be taken to its final stage with the examination of some rather puzzling phenomena. In an area of southern central Europe, north of the Alps and lying roughly between the modern towns of Bern, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Dresden, a consistent series of new types of copper tools, weapons, and ornaments appear overlapping with the end of the Bell-Beaker phase, but not themselves of beaker forms. Furthermore, they replace the beaker metal types and are the prototypes for the whole rich series of bronzes which follow thereafter and dominate the greater part of Europe. The new features include the techniques of riveting a dagger-blade into its haft instead of using a tang as in the beaker tradition; the use of ornaments including spiral wire pendants and ingot-torcs (necklets with returned ends that could also be used as units of copper); and the use of garments fastened by pins instead of buttons....They owe nothing to anything which goes before in Europe, but riveted daggers were the normal Near Eastern type, and the ingot-torcs and specific pin forms do in fact occur in several Near Eastern sites, but especially those in Syria such as Byblos and Ugarit, during a limited period of time around 2000—1800 B.C. Furthermore, the grave-finds in central Europe show a swing-over in the warrior's equipment from the beaker tradition of bow and arrow, to that of the dagger and axe: this change in weapons means a change in tactics to one also current in contemporary Syria. (Fig. 56)
It looks therefore as if shortly after 2000 B.C. contact was established between the metal-smiths and merchants of Syria and the peoples and copper ores of south-central Europe; spectrographic analysis shows that the metal deposits of the Tyrol and elsewhere in central Europe were now being worked. But by what route could such contact be made? The distribution in Europe of the types in question show that while some are found as far east as the River Tisza, they do not occur further east, and the majority are not found further down the Danube than just beyond Vienna. A route up the Danube from the east to south-central Europe seems then unlikely, and we must consider the possibility of trade from the head of the Adriatic over a 200 mile-long route probably crossing the Alps by the St Gothard Pass....And if we look for occasions which might prompt such merchant venturing from the Levant, the disturbed conditions precipitated by the Amorite and other raids at the beginning of the second millennium might well play their part, with the dislocation of previous trading arrangements, and a consequent impetus to seek new metal resources in the outer barbarian world.