Saturday, March 1, 2025

In search of the Minoan Bronze Age

Christopher Pare cannot find tin bronzes in Minoan, pre-Santorini Crete. The alloy was minted first in southern Britain ~2000 BC as we can expect from the tin in Cornwall and maybe south Wales. Dan Davis has a map of Pare's findings.

Pare has it that bronze may have come to the Mycenaeans first.

Davis' comments point out that all these European-Continental sites owned bronze artifacts long before the LBA. To read Davis, standard equipment was still copper or arsenical-bronze. Tin bronze was a sort of magic, "the smith and the devil"; iron in those days was Divine, rained from heaven. Archaeology has a bias to grave-goods which are precious - as is clear from the vast looting they endured in antiquity.

Overall I found Pare at first difficult to believe. Not that tin bronze was Cornish first - that seems obvious - but that it took so many centuries to reach Sicily and the Aegean. I admit the "EBA" Maghreb down the Atlantic used stone but they were a sideline until, what, the Almoravids.

Perhaps we should ponder Tartessos including the Mediterranean Maghreb. We're looking for El Argar, which from 2200-1550 BC mined the copper. So: Murillo-Barroso - it's open, and it's in English. Not much tin (Sn) is found in the deliberate alloys (which don't have arsenic) and where tin is blended, it is blended further with lead. The paper instead notes much more "arsenical copper" which they don't count as a bronze. That implies that tin was known but, I guess, too expensive, unless you were queen.

I'd elsewise expected more Orichalc: not with tin, but with nickel and/or zinc. But no, Zn was only a trace element in El Argar.

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