Changing technologies and transformations of value in the Middle Volga and northeastern Caucasus, circa 3000--1500 BCE

I investigate the role of metal making as a technical and value system over the course of the Bronze Age in the Middle Volga region of the western Eurasian steppes, and the Early to Middle Bronze Age (early to middle 3rd millennium BC) at Velikent, Dagestan. The chief geographic focus is Samara, Russia, from where I examined nearly 100 metal objects from previously excavated kurgan cemeteries, in order to identify similarities, differences, and changes in the activities through which people created and transformed value in metalwork. I also explore how metalwork was used to objectify social distinctions and social values through adornment, and in mortuary rites and alliances.; A survey of traces of mines in northeastern Samara provided a rare opportunity to characterize the scale and organization of the small, dispersed metal production that characteristic of the area in the Late Bronze Age.; EPMA-WDS was utilized for compositional analysis. The results show the importance of recycling in Middle Volga metalworking, especially in the Middle Bronze Age II period. Variations in the metal pool for different cemeteries of the period are supported by statistically verified differences in work patterns as identified by metallography. Metal making itself may have been an important source of communal authority, which positioned participants for direct engagement with outside groups and the formation of new networks. Examined in light of the appearance of specialized communities of metal producers in the neighboring South Urals at this time, the argument is made that the new commodity role of copper and bronze may have been a source of tensions, encouraging metalworkers in Samara to form new networks for the acquisition of bronze (which could not be replenished through local metalworking practices alone) with Volga-Kama forest dwellers to the north.; Tin bronze entered a long-standing tradition of arsenic bronze production at Velikent, where it took on added importance in bodily adornment, along with the systematic production and uses of copper and alloys in the northeastern Caucasus.; Methodologically, the dissertation shows that archaeometallurgy is an important research area for anthropological archaeology.