CORNERSTONES

When stone tools built and broke early states.

The CORNERSTONES Project (2026–2030), funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), investigates the economic factors that drove the emergence, development, and collapse of the first highly centralised and deeply unequal Bronze Age societies (3000–1500 BC). The project focuses on the role of macrolithic tools in productive activities, ranging from food processing to metalworking, in order to understand how the organisation of production, craft specialisation, and exchange networks contributed to transforming the economic and political structures of these societies.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines geology, materials mechanics, functional analysis, ethnoarchaeology, and network analysis, CORNERSTONES examines a range of archaeological contexts, including El Argar, Únětice, Minoan Crete, and Egypt, while also incorporating an ethnoarchaeological perspective in Ghana. This comparative framework makes it possible to explore the relationships between tools, productive practices, and social structures, and to gain deeper insight into the economic mechanisms that fostered the rise and decline of these societies, as well as the transformative processes that helped shape subsequent forms of political organisation.