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Tin is an essential metal in the creation of tin-bronzes, and its acquisition was an important part of ancient cultures from the Bronze Age onward. Its use began in the Middle East and the Balkans around 3000 BC.
Early tin exploitation appears to have been centered on placer deposits of cassiterite. [3] Map of Europe based on Strabo's geography, showing the Cassiterides just off the northwest tip of Iberia where Herodotus believed tin originated in 450 BC. The first evidence of tin use for making bronze appears in the Near East and the Balkans around ...
A study in the journal Antiquity from 2013 reported the discovery of a tin bronze foil from the Pločnik archaeological site dated to c. 4650 BC, as well as 14 other artefacts from Serbia and Bulgaria dated to before 4000 BC, showed that early tin bronze was more common than previously thought and developed independently in Europe 1,500 years before the first tin bronze alloys in the Near East.
Kestel is a probable site of Bronze Age tin mining in the Bolkar range of the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia (near the present village of Celaller, Çamardı District, Niğde Province, Turkey). Tin in the Bronze Age was as scarce and valuable as petroleum is today. It was a vital ingredient of bronze, used with copper to make the alloy.
Tin was first smelted in combination with copper around 3500 BC to produce bronze - and thus giving place to the Bronze Age (except in some places which did not experience a significant Bronze Age, passing directly from the Neolithic Stone Age to the Iron Age). [18]
This network imported tin and charcoal to Cyprus, where copper was mined and alloyed with tin to produce bronze. Bronze objects were then exported far and wide. Isotopic analysis of tin in some Mediterranean bronze artefacts suggests that they may have originated from Bronze Age Britain. [76]
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids, such as arsenic or silicon.
What could be defined as a basic Phoenician metal “kit” is composed mainly of the “Irano–Scythian” shape of three winged and socketed arrowheads made mainly of tin bronze, sometimes with arsenic and/or lead and left as-cast, and “hand”-like decorated fibulae made of good quality (7 wt%–12 wt% Sn) tin bronze and lead (up to 17 wt ...