The Alpine area presents many small copper deposits, mostly exploited since Late Medieval times. This led to the widespread assumption that these ores were exploited much before and that most circulating prehistoric metal objects were produced with local copper sources. This assumption was largely validated for the Bronze Age through the use of lead isotope tracers, and well supported by the archaeological and archaeometallurgical evidences. However, the scarcity of available lead isotope data for pre-Bronze Age metals precluded to date the reconstruction of the metal flow in the 4^th and 3^rd millennia BC [1-2]. 

Based on 49 new analyses of archaeologically important artefacts, it is now shown that the Northern Italian Eneolithic (or Copper Age, approximately 3500-2200 BC) includes three chronologically distinct periods of metal production: Balkanic, Tuscanian, and Alpine copper [3]. 

The Alpine ores were massively exploited only starting from the middle of the 3^rd millennium BC, in connection or slightly earlier than the Beaker event.