The first phase of the work, carried out at the Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche e dei Beni Culturali of the University of Siena, consisted in reordering the assemblage of metal finds recovered during the excavation campaigns conducted between 2005 and 2018 at the site of Vetricella (Scarlino, GR), especially during the last three years, the latter coinciding with the start of the nEU-Med project.

The study of over 1,500 objects was accompanied by a series of preliminary operations aimed at slowing the deterioration process, a factor that closely affects this class of materials.

The successive creation of a purposefully built relational database allowed to fully document each object, ‘splitting’ it when necessary so as to record each part separately (Fig.1).

The current creation of typological groupings and dimensional sub-types, along with the graphic recording of the most representative amongst these, will be followed by bibliographic research connected to our territory of reference along with chronologically contemporary contexts both in the peninsula and also northern Europe. The objective is to provide not only a chronologically and comparative reading of the assemblage, but also to offer a clearer functional interpretation, especially for those categories of artefacts that are markedly polyfunctional.