[HN Gopher] Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cor...
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Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall
Author : danans
Score : 266 points
Date : 2020-01-21 07:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.archaeology-world.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.archaeology-world.com)
| 1wd wrote:
| From a 2016 talk: "Possible some came from Cornwall though I
| rather doubt they went up there more than once in a blue moon.
| There are some tin mines in southern Turkey but not enough. The
| vast majority came from Afghanistan. Specifically the Badakhshan
| region of Afghanistan." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-
| ysocX4&feature=youtu.be...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Is it unfeasible that the tin was traded from ancient Britain
| to ancient France to Ancient Greece to ancient Israel in sort
| of a chain rather than ships transporting them directly to
| Israel?
| leoc wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I think it's a given that high-value
| durable goods like this could change hands many times. For
| example, probably no-one travelled all the way with the
| Indian metal objects which have been found in Britain:
| https://www.caitlingreen.org/2014/12/indian-silver-coins-
| in-... .
| [deleted]
| keiferski wrote:
| The Amber Road is also a possibility:
|
| _From at least the 16th century BC, amber was moved from
| Northern Europe to the Mediterranean area.[2][3] The breast
| ornament of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen (c. 1333-1324
| BC) contains large Baltic amber beads._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road
| tremon wrote:
| Using the amber road would be quite a detour here, I
| imagine. That would mean that instead of crossing the
| channel and traveling through France and Italy, or
| circumnavigating the Iberian peninsula, you think it's more
| likely the tin traveled from Britain, across Scandinavia,
| then to the Baltics, and from there southwards across
| Eastern Europe?
|
| Not that I have any knowledge of ancient trade routes, but
| to me having a trade route from Britain towards the
| northeast instead of southeast feels weird.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I assume "trade routes" are emergent things.
|
| As in: Nobody decided "let's start a trade route from
| Egypt to Scandinavia!".
|
| Far more likely, people traded with their neighbors, and
| market forces led to goods step by step traveling to
| where they were most valued.
|
| Probably without Egyptians and Scandinavians ever having
| a clue the other group existed.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| I buy tin in one market town and sell it for 5% more at
| the market town a week's journey away. Or I load up my
| ship with tin in one port town and sell it for 20% more
| at the port town a month's journey away. That tin can go
| quite a distance without any one captain having to load
| up in Penzance and do a long haul all the way to the
| terminal end of the Mediterranean.
|
| But even that would have been possible, if anyone had
| enough knowledge of enough prices for common trade goods
| at enough of the ports along the way. One trip would make
| the owner, captain, and crew rich enough for it to be
| worth the risk.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know much about the actual trade routes, I
| was more pointing out that 'stuff from northern Europe'
| made it to Israel / the Levant.
|
| In any case, I don't think it's much more of a detour
| though, especially if we assume that it wasn't a specific
| journey, but a chain of multiple cultures interacting
| with each other. It doesn't seem implausible to me that
| tin went from Britain to Scandinavia then down the Amber
| Road, but I'm not a historian.
| usrusr wrote:
| Possible, but given the prominence of naval trade within the
| Mediterranean they might have been the ones running the
| northwestern hops as well.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This over-land route was common, afaik. It may be one of the
| reasons the Greeks founded a colony near the Rhone delta:
| present day Marseille.
|
| Avoiding this route to sail directly to Northern Europe may
| also be why a Greek explorer from Marseille, Pytheas [1],
| gave us one of the first, if not the first, direct accounts
| of the British Isles.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas
| jmorse2 wrote:
| On the other hand, Herodotus describes islands off the
| north/west of Europe "from which we are said to have our tin"
| [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterides
| austincheney wrote:
| When I was in Afghanistan the mines in Badakshan were known for
| the high quality lapiz lazuli and pale colored jade that were
| traded in shops through out the country. There is an estimated
| $5 trillion in mineral deposits in the region, which is the
| second most valuable source of largely untapped natural
| resources on land.
| kiliantics wrote:
| I believe Afghanistan is also home to the world's largest
| lithium deposits, which will become increasingly valuable for
| renewable energy
| supernova87a wrote:
| Amazing to imagine how back then, there must've been brokers or
| imperial court wizards / Game of Thrones style, who were the few
| that knew about such places where magical materials would come
| from and only have the smallest inkling of what those properties
| meant. And those materials would travel thousands of miles
| secreted in pouches to find their way to someone worthy of the
| rarity.
|
| And today, you can buy any of those things for a few $ off the
| internet and have it delivered to you.
| netcan wrote:
| It'll be interesting to find what follows.
|
| 3k ybp is a relatively unique timestamp for tin. This is during
| or shortly after the bronze age collapse, where many
| mediterranean civilisations (greece, egypt, assyria, hatti..)
| receded, and bronze (inc tin) trade receded with them. Bronze
| presumably became scarce, and ironworking developed as the
| eventual alternative.
|
| The centuries of the last bronze dark age is the mythical period
| of iron age cultures (eg the hero achilles, king david, Rome's
| founders Romulus & Remus)...
|
| In any case, it was a period of change... changing politics
| politics, migrations, trade patterns & metallurgy/metal-trade.
|
| Does anyone know if these are new methods for identifying origin?
| Should we expect more artefacts? If so, we might find be able to
| identify all sorts of new trade patterns, and see if they relate
| to political/population chronologies... mythical characters may
| find themselves in a slightly more historical context.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _This is during or shortly after the bronze age collapse..._
| "
|
| Shortly before (13-12th century BCE) the "collapse" (12-11th
| century BCE).
|
| From the PLOS One conclusions: " _Although many questions
| remain unanswered and new ones arose, the integrated approach
| of using trace elements, tin and lead isotopes turns out to be
| a promising tool for provenancing and fingerprinting ancient
| tin objects. It should be followed up by future
| archaeometallurgical research in order to unravel the enigma of
| BA tin. In this form, our study should stimulate new
| discussions on the provenance of tin of the Eurasian BA rather
| than postulating an origin from a specific deposit._ "
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Climate change, too. The Minoan Warm Period ended around this
| time, and temps would not return to their optimum until the
| Roman Warm Period almost 1000 years later. Had to have an
| effect on agriculture and trade.
| netcan wrote:
| There's evidence for climate changes, earthquakes,
| revolutions, invasions, war, economic crisis, political
| crisis, ethnogenesis (both historiographical like accounts of
| sea peoples & mythical like exodus)... all seemingly
| substantial and concurrent.
|
| ..that's kinda why it's such an interesting and mysterious
| period. There's tons of room for theories on causes, effects
| and incidentals.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've wondered if there could have been origin and spread of
| new plant pathogens.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >This is during or shortly after the bronze age collapse, where
| many mediterranean civilisations
|
| All the tin in this study is from the centuries before the
| collapse, 1530-~1200
|
| >Does anyone know if these are new methods for identifying
| origin?
|
| Most of this tin was taken from shipwrecks, and the dating
| method is derived from there. I believe trace elements have
| been able to tie metal to a mining location for a while.
| 1wd wrote:
| The research paper:
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| You hear people today saying we live in a "global economy." It
| seems like that statement might be true of people hundreds or
| even thousands of years ago.
| mhh__ wrote:
| True but what magnitude?
|
| On the one hand, I'm always surprised by (say) how many
| thousands of gallons of beer could be produced by a victorian
| brewery but equally, we make a hell of a lot more now.
| Retric wrote:
| A large chunk of that is simply differences in population
| sizes. The current US population is likely larger than the
| global population in 1,000 CE. Further, children used to make
| up a larger chunk of the population exaggerating the
| differences.
|
| So, it was often possible to scale up production even more,
| but there where not enough customers to justify it.
| rmah wrote:
| The vast majority of limited trade during pre-industrial
| times is due to the inefficiency of (i.e. cost) of long
| range transportation. A single modern cargo ship can carry
| more cargo in a single voyage than an entire years worth of
| the entire medieval world's cargo fleets. And at a price
| that is few orders of magnitude cheaper (per ton).
|
| Not that it mattered since production of everything was, by
| today's standards, a few orders of magnitude less
| efficient. It's often difficult to fully grasp how
| inefficient and slow everything was in pre-industrial times
| until you dig into the details.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Remember that the economies of scale were made possible by
| technology.
|
| Budweiser, Miller, etc dominated the US market with an
| inferior product because they could build a distribution
| network and ship/store the product at massive scale at low
| cost. This was particularly important post-prohibition.
| Consistently mediocre, branded/marketed, cheap beer was more
| valuable than local stuff.
| cat199 wrote:
| 'economy of scale' is a spectrum and also related to input
| costs, of which technology is one of many such as labor
| cost, etc. Also, 'technology' means 'one producers relative
| advantage in technology' rather than 'the invention of X in
| the year Y'
| h2odragon wrote:
| Look at how metals were traded in that time. "Bullhide ingots"
| are not uncommon and are widespread, Certainly people copied
| good ideas and used them locally, too; but I've always thought
| that evidence of some clever (and tough!) folks doing a _lot_
| of running all over the ancient world.
| ballooney wrote:
| It's certainly, unambiguously, true (the Silk Roads were
| roughly 200AD onwards, and the Roman Empire was trading for
| centuries before that for smaller values of 'global').
| keiferski wrote:
| Eh, that's a false equivalency. Ancient economies had far less
| impact on each other, even if they did trade some things
| occasionally. Today, economies are far more global in an
| interconnected sense; if America, China or the EU have a
| recession, the rest of the world probably does too. The same
| scenario would not be true a couple thousand years ago.
| simonh wrote:
| Several Roman emperors banned silk dresses because the silk
| trade was draining all the gold coinage out of the Imperial
| economy.
| kassas wrote:
| Funny. There was no "Israel" 3000 years ago, it is called
| "Palestine". Zionists invaded and occupied Palestine.
| boudewijnrempt wrote:
| What the place was called 3000 years ago is irrelevant; today
| it's called Israel, and that's where the archaeologists have
| digged it up. The article actually says "modern-day Israel" and
| "modern-day Britain" in places. (Because, of course, 3000 years
| ago what's now called Great Britain wasn't called that
| either...)
| [deleted]
| bserfaty wrote:
| The name "Palestine" was given by the Romans. The area was
| known to it's inhabitants as Judea. During the iron age the
| kingdoms of Judea and Israel existed in the area. The name
| "Israel" first appears in the Merneptah Stele c. 1209 BCE:
| "Israel is laid waste and his seed is no more."
| jaratec wrote:
| The name is older, it comes from the philistines, one of the
| people that emerged after the bronze age colapse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines
| lucozade wrote:
| A suggestion. If you're going to troll on HN, at least do a
| modicum of research. Otherwise you just come across as an
| ignorant tosser.
| turkthrower123 wrote:
| Careful. It is against forum rules to ever criticize zionists
| or israeli's brutal invasion and enslavement of Palestine
| hprotagonist wrote:
| The salt mines in Hallstatt germany date back to about that
| period too, and have longer trade route reach than was previously
| believed as well.
|
| We've been pretty good at selling stuff for a while, I suspect.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > We've been pretty good at selling stuff for a while, I
| suspect.
|
| Indeed. There were similar trade routes in North America,
| likely using the Mississippi River for transportation.
|
| Ocean shells in the Midwest. Object made from Michigan copper
| all over the continent. Likewise tools made from obsidian from
| the west.
|
| Our ancestors were collectively as smart and motivated as we
| are.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I've come to think of this as "the ancient world bucket
| brigade".
| arethuza wrote:
| This reminds me of:
|
| _" And did those feet in ancient time. Walk upon Englands
| mountains green"_
|
| Referring to the myth/legend that Jesus visited England with
| Joseph of Arimathea:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35304508
| vfclists wrote:
| How about the bronzes of Sanxingdui?
| tssva wrote:
| During the run of the British archeology TV show "Time Team" they
| examined a couple of sites in Cornwall associated with tin. In
| each episode they discuss the far reaching international trade
| for tin from Cornwall during the bronze age including as far as
| to locations in Africa, so while adding to archaeological
| knowledge this find doesn't seem to be breaking new ground.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The new ground is that isotopic analysis established beyond
| doubt the source of tin used in the overwhelming majority of
| pre-2000 BC bronze, overcoming historians's skepticism about
| non-contemporaneous sources.
| rmah wrote:
| The new ground is that the tin is dated from apx 1000 BCE
| rather than 2000 BCE to 1500 BCE when the trade from the now
| british isles to the near east cultures was well established.
| These trade routes were thought to be disrupted during the
| bronze age collapse which, IIRC, started around 1500 BCE.
| ocschwar wrote:
| We don't know exactly why the Bronze Age collapse happened,
| but it's likely that copper was what was disrupted, because
| copper smelting results in deforestation.So a perfectly
| functioning and open tin trading route meeting a society that
| can't find copper any more would explain this find.
| jaratec wrote:
| Copper was readily availble in cyprus. So, no, that's not
| what happened.
| ocschwar wrote:
| Copper was available so long as firewood was available.
| Copper ore without firewood is of no use.
| Schattenbaer wrote:
| Those interested in (one of) the methods used to determine the
| origin of archeological finds might find Neutron Activation
| Analysis
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation_analysis)
| interesting.
|
| Basically, fire neutrons into your item, and then look at how it
| [edit: radioactively] decays to determine the constituent
| chemical elements.
|
| My one beer-brewing book mentioned that they can trace some pot
| sherds to a specific region of a specific river using this
| method. Very cool.
| werds wrote:
| unrelated, but what beer-brewing book includes this sort of
| information?
| Schattenbaer wrote:
| I can't remember exactly as I haven't made beer in years and
| sold all my books and equipment - but - I _think_ it was
| _Uncorking the Past_ by Patrick Mcgovern.
|
| It could also have been John Palmer's _How to Brew_ too - I
| remember the author goes into super interesting detail about
| metallurgy and similar topics.
| acvny wrote:
| We got it all wrong. People migrated from the North Pole towards
| Africa not the other wy around.
| INTPenis wrote:
| This is so interesting because one of my favorite books is Island
| in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling.
|
| It's an alternative history sci-fi book where the author proposes
| that greeks are sending envoys to britain in 1250bc for trade.
|
| To be precise, Iberian greek colonies are sending these envoys
| but they speak a common language being ancient greek.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Rather bizarre the article implies direct ships from Cornwall to
| the middle east.
|
| Surely much more likely a trading network, where things change
| hands multiple times before reaching destination, probably with
| key trading hubs.
|
| In fact the tin was found off the coast - just as likely to have
| been on route to somewhere else.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Prior to the invention of the railroad, all bulk goods
| (including food and non-precious metals like tin) could
| essentially only be traded long distance via ship. It simply
| isn't practical to move them via animal-drawn carts; the
| animals cost too much, they eat too much, it takes too long,
| and the roads weren't there.
|
| Rome, for example, was supplied by an unbelievable number of
| ships' worth of food every day. It would have starved without
| that ocean access; there's not enough nearby land to be used as
| farmland to grow all the necessary food in the pre-railroad
| era.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Tin _was_ very valuable. In fact most often we find high-
| value product have travelled long distances. Like jewelry,
| decorative items. Is tin one of these?
| btilly wrote:
| Even after the invention of the railroad, it is cheaper to
| sail from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal to New York
| than to send the same load cross country by train.
|
| Railroads are the cheapest form of land transportation. But
| boats are cheaper still.
| jmorse2 wrote:
| Biblical sources describe tin as being sourced from Tarshish
| [0], a remote island that traded with the Phoenician naval
| merchants in Tyre. Plus as wtracz' sibling comment indicates
| there's a potential Phoenician connection with Cornwall, it
| isn't especially unlikely.
|
| [0] https://www.blueletterbible.org/esv/eze/27/12/s_829012
| narag wrote:
| Tarsis is thought to be refering to Cadiz in Spain. Cadiz was
| founded by phoenicians (if you visit, make sure to check the
| archeological museum [0]) to trade with the lost kingdom of
| Tartessos.
|
| Tartessos is placed in the Guadalquivir estuary by Rufus
| Festus Avienus' _Ora Maritima_ , but its exact location is
| unknown. There are some efforts to pinpoint it using
| satellite images, because its ruins could be buried under the
| sand.
|
| https://www.visit-andalucia.com/one_post.php?id=111
| chippy wrote:
| From the article: "Given the limited technology at the time and
| the lack of roads, the most plausible way for the ingots to
| have reached modern-day Israel was by sea"
|
| From the paper: "Direct contacts between the British Isles and
| the Eastern Mediterranean are not assured at present, while
| inter-regional and international trade networks between the
| latter and northern and central Europe seem to be well
| documented for the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE
| [145-148]. "
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| thrower123 wrote:
| I agree, it seems more likely to me that it operated similarly
| to the principles that held the Silk Road together. Almost no
| one did a Marco Polo and went all the way from the
| Mediterranean to Peking; instead most of the trade was bucket-
| brigading goods from one market town to the other.
| mmikeff wrote:
| I haven't got the book to hand but have read of Moorish pirates
| kidnapping fishermen from their boats around the Lizard
| peninsula and selling them into slavery. If true then the idea
| of ships travelling directly may not be so far fetched. (edit -
| in the 1600s though)
| wtracz wrote:
| There has always been speculation that there was a Phoenician
| connection to Cornwall, but not a lot of archeological
| evidence.
|
| This stemmed from things like Cornish place names having an
| unusual number of z's (a Phoenician letter) in them, and other
| similarities.
| gbear605 wrote:
| I don't want to discredit this, since I don't know your
| source, but linguistically that seems quite unlikely for a
| consonant introduced three thousand years ago to have
| influence on the modern Cornish place names. Three thousand
| years ago, the Celtic languages hadn't even split from proto-
| Celtic, so any influence on Cornish should have also had
| influenced on the rest of the Celtic languages. In addition,
| the sound /z/ is a very common one across languages (so it
| does indicated Phoenician influence), and they didn't have a
| script then to write the place names (so the orthographic
| letter z doesn't mean anything).
| mprev wrote:
| I'm not an expert so forgive what might be a naive
| question.
|
| Even if the languages had not split, could there still not
| be regionalised influences on place names?
| gbear605 wrote:
| That's true, but the long time change leaves it quite
| unlikely that the names would leave enough of a remnant
| of a particular sounds that you could point to a
| Phoenician influence.
| jaratec wrote:
| Can you point me to the information sources for this theory?
| ocschwar wrote:
| Britain and Wales don't have a lot of evidence for a Phoenician
| presence, but interestingly, some place names on the west of
| the island have Semitic names, and those places make sense as
| locations where Phoenicians would be allowed to land to trade
| for the tin but not allowed to venture inland. Most interesting
| is Echri Island in the Severn river. It's the most inland
| island in the river, making it the last island a ship would try
| to land on if forbidden to land in the mainland. And E-kh-R is
| the Semitic root for the word "last." (A-kha-ron in Hebrew.)
|
| While I'm at this, it's no secret that coastal cities in Spain
| have Phoenician names: Barcelona, Malaga, Cartagena and Cadiz.
| Cadiz comes from "gader," meaning "boundary", and the
| Phoenician colonists there were charged with making sure nobody
| except Carthaginians would be allowed to sail west of there
| (and then on to Britain.)
| dotancohen wrote:
| > While I'm at this, it's no secret that coastal >
| cities in Spain have Phoenician names
|
| Spain itself, Espana, comes from "Ei hashafanim" y hshpnym or
| "Island of bunny/hyrax", which once were abundant there.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| Bronze-age collapse, the Sea Peoples
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples and Phoenician trade
| routes...
|
| Trade is a given. Celtic (mode) jewelry found in near-eastern
| sites, riverine trade routes littered with evidence from around
| 5-6k BCE indicating vast ancient world trade networks.
|
| While first discovered writing on clay tablets in Mesopotamia are
| first SURVIVING samples of writing, this doesn't preclude
| cellulose-based writing media (paper) that simply rotted.
| Harrappan and early Sumerian trade has been also archeologically
| demonstrated, as well as Harrappan and <name of Anatolian city
| complexes recently found I forget...> trade routes, based upon
| found artifacts likely origins.
| guerrilla wrote:
| did you mean Gobeki Tepi?
| contingencies wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
| mcguire wrote:
| If I'm reading that correctly, then not Gobekli Tepe; the
| two phases there are paleolithic-neolithic and "classical".
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| Humans have likely been trading, boating, and migrating since
| we stood upright on some African savannah so many hundreds of
| thousands of years ago.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Boating probably came a little later than that.
| avip wrote:
| Weird article. It reads as-if it's a new discovery, yet the "tin
| comes from England" meme appears in 2K yo maps
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterides).
|
| In the "Haifa marine Museum" you've never heard of, there are tin
| pieces found in Phoenician ships, that's ~3K yo and IIRC the sign
| even says the Tin is from today's England.
|
| [edit: of course this piece could be referencing new confirmation
| or new methodology - we'll never know, as there are no references
| to anything of substance. The research is from
| https://www.researchgate.net/project/Bronze-Age-tin-Tin-isot...]
| shahar2k wrote:
| hah! my grandmother's house was right next to this museum,
| loved going in there and exploring the various ships. (right
| under the balls)
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| > Weird article. It reads as-if it's a new discovery, yet the
| "tin comes from England" meme appear in 2K yo
|
| This is about tin from over a millennium before that map.
|
| > we'll never know, as there are no references to anything of
| substance
|
| The spectrometer, diffractomer, and xray analysis isn't
| substance?
| avip wrote:
| I don't see any spectrometer, diffractomer, or xray analysis
| in that post. Did I miss it somehow ?
| peeters wrote:
| Not OP, and it's an article about an article about a study,
| but I think this is where the analysis would be mentioned:
|
| > According to Phys.org, the researchers used "lead and tin
| isotope data as well as trace element analysis" to identify
| where the metal was originally mined. What they found was
| totally unexpected.
|
| Phys.org article in question in here but says the same
| thing: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-enigma-bronze-age-
| tin.html
|
| I don't have access to the actual study contents.
| avip wrote:
| I've linked to it above. It's in Dutch but the analysis
| is there.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The English copy is there too, though that site is a
| nightmare to navigate. Here's the direct link.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/jour
| nal...
| pvaldes wrote:
| > "lead and tin isotope data as well as trace element
| analysis" to identify where the metal was originally
| mined.
|
| A problem could be that metals scrappings can be
| recycled. Who grants that a tin was not part of a ship's
| hull before?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| They were ingots found in shipwrecks and do not appear to
| have the characteristics of a metal reused.
| hinkley wrote:
| Is this essentially a superset of the techniques they use
| to identify gold bullion? I understood they have a map of
| trace elements by mine so that gold isn't really fungible
| (if stolen or used for criminal activity, they can figure
| out where it came from and connect the dots).
| mcguire wrote:
| They mention phys.org (as well as the Daily Mail and Angle
| News), which has "The enigma of bronze age tin"
| (https://phys.org/news/2019-09-enigma-bronze-age-tin.html),
| which points to PLOS One "Isotope systematics and chemical
| composition of tin ingots from Mochlos (Crete) and other Late
| Bronze Age sites in the eastern Mediterranean Sea: An ultimate
| key to tin provenance?" (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti
| cle?id=10.1371/journal...).
|
| Abstract: " _The origin of the tin used for the production of
| bronze in the Eurasian Bronze Age is still one of the mysteries
| in prehistoric archaeology. In the past, numerous studies were
| carried out on archaeological bronze and tin objects with the
| aim of determining the sources of tin, but all failed to find
| suitable fingerprints. In this paper we investigate a set of 27
| tin ingots from well-known sites in the eastern Mediterranean
| Sea (Mochlos, Uluburun, Hishuley Carmel, Kfar Samir south,
| Haifa) that had been the subject of previous archaeological and
| archaeometallurgical research. By using a combined approach of
| tin and lead isotopes together with trace elements it is
| possible to narrow down the potential sources of tin for the
| first time. The strongly radiogenic composition of lead in the
| tin ingots from Israel allows the calculation of a geological
| model age of the parental tin ores of 291 +- 17 Ma. This
| theoretical formation age excludes Anatolian, central Asian and
| Egyptian tin deposits as tin sources since they formed either
| much earlier or later. On the other hand, European tin deposits
| of the Variscan orogeny agree well with this time span so that
| an origin from European deposits is suggested. With the help of
| the tin isotope composition and the trace elements of the
| objects it is further possible to exclude many tin resources
| from the European continent and, considering the current state
| of knowledge and the available data, to conclude that Cornish
| tin mines are the most likely suppliers for the 13th-12th
| centuries tin ingots from Israel. Even though a different
| provenance seems to be suggested for the tin from Mochlos and
| Uluburun by the actual data, these findings are of great
| importance for the archaeological interpretation of the trade
| routes and the circulation of tin during the Late Bronze Age.
| They demonstrate that the trade networks between the eastern
| Mediterranean and some place in the east that are assumed for
| the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE (as indicated by
| textual evidence from Kultepe /Kanes and Mari) did not exist in
| the same way towards the last quarter of the millennium._"
|
| Archaeology World seems kind of sketchy.
| yread wrote:
| There is also this
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk
|
| Even though Germany is not as far, it's from 1600 BC
| ncmncm wrote:
| People have always suspected Bronze-age tin might have come
| from England, but most historians never took it seriously
| because it implied a lot more long-distance commerce than they
| believed was possible then.
|
| Charred cloves from the Moluccas (south of the Philippines)
| were recently found in in a jar in burnt-out remains of a
| 4000-year-old middle-class kitchen in Syria.
| everdrive wrote:
| >Charred cloves from the Moluccas (south of the Philippines)
| were recently found in in a jar in burnt-out remains of a
| 4000-year-old middle-class kitchen in Syria.
|
| This sounds amazing -- do you have a source for this?
| swampangel wrote:
| Sounds like:
|
| https://boroughmarket.org.uk/articles/the-spice-series-
| cinna...
|
| https://books.google.ca/books?id=SpmdDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=P
| T...
| n4r9 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia this is a misidentification (i.e.
| not actually a clove), based on the following sources:
|
| http://theconversation.com/worlds-oldest-clove-heres-what-
| ou...
|
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/004382400409934
| [deleted]
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