While trade and craft production played an important part in the overall structure of economic life in Bronze Age Europe, for most people most of the time what mattered was the procurement of food and the production of commodities in the home. Smiths, traders, even warriors and heroes had to eat and be protected from the elements; and if they did not produce and process their foodstuffs themselves, others in their homes and villages must have done. Yet the study of this aspect of Bronze Age life is curiously underdeveloped. Perhaps because the remains of economic activities are mundane in nature they have attracted little attention, and a narrative account of the domestic economy is still barely possible. Only by supposing that the many gaps in the evidence can be filled in from similar evidence elsewhere, by building a composite picture, can a more rounded account be attempted.

Agriculture and food production

Peasant farming was the mainstay of Bronze Age life. The study of Bronze Age agriculture is based on a number of sources: artefacts, cultivation traces, field outlines and the remains of the exploited materials, plant and animal.

Artefacts

The tools that the prehistoric farmer needed were analogous to those needed by modern farmers, and revolve around the main processes of agriculture: tools to break the ground, remove weeds and bring up nutrients from the subsoil (spades, hoes, digging sticks and ards or ploughs); and tools to bring in and process the harvest (sickles or reaping knives, threshing and winnowing devices).