Posted on 05/07/2015 3:43:32 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...In the course of both Boyd's and Watrous' excavations, more than 50 houses or areas with evidence of industrial activity have been uncovered -- 20 areas producing pottery, 15 producing stone vases, 18 producing bronze and bronze implements, and some with evidence for textile production. At one location on the north edge of the settlement, Buell points out an area of burned bedrock inside a space identified as a foundry. 'Here we have all sorts of scraps of bronze crucibles, bronze drips, copper scraps, and iron used for flux. Elsewhere, we also found a tin ingot, the closest known source of which is Afghanistan, and copper ingots from Cyprus, so it's clear they are making and working metal into objects on the site,' he says.
One of the most important areas the team has excavated is on Gournia's northern edge, where archaeologist John Younger of the University of Kansas has uncovered a complete pottery workshop where the town's inhabitants were making both red clay coarse wares and buff clay fine wares. In one room of the workshop there is a heap of what Younger calls 'gray matter,' which, when his team sectioned it and sent it for analysis, was identified as possibly being clay from Vasiliki Ware, similar to that used to make the distinctive Gournia pottery, called Mirabello Ware, that is found at sites all over eastern and central Crete. In another room, in a phase dating to the Neopalatial period, Younger found 15 intact pots sitting upright on some benches, and in another room he found four large jars with numerous smaller pots inside... in a small area east of the workshop, the team found no less than 11 kilns superimposed on each other, further evidence of the impressive duration and scale of Gournia's industrial production.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
The Minoans were excellent builders, as shown by the town's many well-paved roads and the elegant ashlar masonry walls flanking the western courtyard of Gournia's palace. (Courtesy Janet Spiller)
What is up with this nonsense? This is the third time I've seen this repeated in the last week or so.
Most of the Bronze Age tin came from Iberia, with some from the Sudeten, Cornwall and other places.
Have any of the people proposing this ever looked at a map? Spain and Cornwall were infinitely more accessible in the Bronze Age than Afghanistan.
It’s a problem with the conventional pseudochronology, in part; also the lapis lazuli trade and bead trade is quite old.
BTW, there’s a bunch of other nice pics at the article.
Crete has always fascinated me.
For one thing the Athenians from their earliest times remembered Crete as the dominant power in the Aegean, maybe the Mediterranean.
It really does seem ancient and not that much is known about it.
Jewels are a whole lot more portable than bulk metals, even very valuable bulk metals. Tin mines in Cornwall, NW Spain and Brittany are very old.
Interesting post:
Nikolaus Boroffka · Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
I joined ResearchGate much later, so I have seen your question only now, and it may be out of date.
I have been part of a research group which studied the tin question for several years (some of us are continuing still). One major result of our excavations and analyses was the discovery of the (at present) oldest known tin-mines in Tajikistan (Central Asia), which date to the late 3rd or early 2nd Millennium BC. Tin was already in use at that time in Mesopotamia, but we did not excavate all mines, so that possibly we missed the oldest ones. In any case, for the time we could prove close trade contacts are indeed documented between that region and Mesopotamia.
It is also interesting that the mine in Tajikistan (the site is called Mushiston) actually contains an extremely rare geological situation. The ore there is a mix of copper and tin - a unique case of a “bronze” ore, as our experiments with smelting also confirmed!
If the question is still acute, let me know and I can give publication references - much is available on my site at academia.edu.
http://www.researchgate.net/post/At_what_place_the_Copper-Tin_alloy_Bronze_may_be_invented
That would only be true if the Minoans were a seafaring people... oh wait.
Yes, that's what I thought they meant. The land trade routes have been slowly revealed to be of astonishing length. It's a long way from Afghanistan to Crete but Mesopotamia is right on that route.
Absolutely correct but Afghanistan sounds more exotic. Wasn’t Sudetenland the oldest currently known site? Tin is rare but not rare enough to require trade routes to Central Asia. Arsenic is also used in bronze but the life span of the smelters wasn’t too good.
Acck. I really ought to look things up before posting. Turns out Afghanistan and Cornwall are very nearly identically far from Crete, about 4000 km. It’s about 2500 km to the Ore Mountains. To Galicia you’re back to that 4000 km.
I suspect tin was precious enough that the major civilizations in the Middle East used up any that reached them from Afghanistan rather than shipping it on to Crete.
If they find an arc welder, I'll be impressed.
You have an “easy” ocean route to Spain and established trade routes to Sudetenland. I’d never say Afghanistan was easy, unless It was during the Maurya Empire and then the mountains would have made things difficult, to say the least. I’d stay with your first post.
Minnows of Creek
The relevant mines in Spain are on the other side, so not really all that easy.
There`s lots of tin in Indonesia too. That`s a little farther than Kabul but it`s an all-water route from Baghdad.
“Most of the Bronze Age tin came from Iberia, with some from the Sudeten, Cornwall and other places.”
Not necessarily in the Early Bronze Age. It’s not until around 2500-2000 BC that we see those sources of tin being exploited, so they may be talking about the period before that.
You probably don't mean Xray diffraction (crystal structure determination) for identifying the geographical origin.
You probably mean that Xray fluorescence of heavier metallic elements might help. But actually, straight-forward chemical assay ought to pinpoint the origin of an ore, by the elemental analysis.
And why would one use mass spectrometry for this purpose?
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