Lead isotopes of prehistoric copper tools define metallurgical phases in Late Neolithic and Eneolithic Italy.

The diffuse presence of small copper ore deposits in the Alpine area, mostly exploited since Late Medieval times, led most scholars to assume that these deposits may actually be active much earlier and that many of the circulating prehistoric metal objects found in the area were produced with local copper sources. This assumption was recently validated for the Recent Bronze Age through the use of lead isotope tracers, and well supported by the archaeometallurgical evidences found in the South-Eastern Alps. However, the scarcity of available lead isotope data for pre-Bronze Age metals precluded to date the reconstruction of the metal flow through the Late Neolithic and Eneolithic (or Copper Age). Based on 49 new analyses of important archaeological objects from the Alpine region, the Po River Valley and Central Italy, mostly axes dated from the Late Neolithic to the Late Eneolithic, here we show that the diffusion of copper in Northern Italy (approximately 4500-2200 BC) includes three major periods of metal use and/or production, each related to specific ore sources. The South Alpine copper was massively used only starting from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, in connection or slightly earlier than the Beaker event.