The Bronze Age of Globalization

Palladium magazine ^ | December 5, 2025 | Stephen Pimentel

[SunkenCiv]

...for over two millennia, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean... possessed copper in abundance. They had gold, timber, and grain... What they did not have was tin... in the early centuries, tin came from... Central and South Asia, from the Zeravshan Valley in what is now Tajikistan and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan... By the Late Bronze Age, the kingdoms had turned to the sea... In 1982, a sponge diver off the coast of Grand Cape in Turke... found what came to be known as the Uluburun shipwreck... mostly, it carried metal. There were ten tons of copper, in the shape of "oxhide" ingots, mostly from Cyprus... it carried one ton of tin. The ratio tells the tale: ten to one, the recipe for bronze... Eleven tons of metal could outfit an army, enough bronze for five thousand swords... Archaeologists had initially relied on lead isotope analysis, in which the decay of uranium and thorium creates a geological clock within the metal... To trace the tin, scientists developed a multivariate approach, examining a number of isotopes and trace elements to create a broad signature. The results of this analysis told a story of a diversified supply chain. Some of the tin appeared to match the signature of the eastern mines in Tajikistan. Other evidence pointed toward the Taurus Mountains of Turkey... The real shock, however, came when this multivariate technique was used to trace ingots found in shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. These ingots... came from Cornwall... The lead isotope ratios, the trace elements of indium and antimony, all align. The tin found in the sunken cargoes of the eastern Mediterranean, the tin that was destined to become the weapons of the Israelites or the Philistines or the Egyptians, had been torn from the earth of southwest Britain.

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TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: afghanistan; ancientnavigation; bronze; bronzeage; clickbait; copper; cornwall; cyprus; egypt; godsgravesglyphs; hindukush; israel; japan; jomon; philistines; tajikistan; taurusmountains; tin; turke; turkey; uluburunii; zeravshanvalley

[SunkenCiv]

This week we are joined by Dr Mark Hudson, archaeologist in the interdisciplinary Eurasia3angle research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, to discuss Bronze Age Globalization. Mark's research of Jomon-era Japan has indicated that socio-cultural exchange occurred between the Japanese archipelago and mainland Eurasia, followed by a re-Jomonization where external cultures were rejected in a return to the local. I will be asking Mark what prehistoric globalization looked like and how it relates to our contemporary understanding of the process today. 

Beyond Japan Ep. #43: Bronze Age Globalization with Dr Mark Hudson | 21:54 
Centre for Japanese Studies, UEA | 521 subscribers | 87 views | July 8, 2021

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks for the link!

[Adder]

Yeah, that’s what I had thought: that Britain was a big producer of tin.

[Aside: Merry Christmas to you! Thanks for all you do! I look forward to your posts in the coming year.]