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Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

archaeology-world.com

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Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#61

Post by Schattenbaer »

werds wrote: post #58
Schattenbaer wrote: post #54

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…

unrelated, but what beer-brewing book includes this sort of information?

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.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#62

Post by yread »

avip wrote: post #42

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…

There is also this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

Even though Germany is not as far, it's from 1600 BC

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#63

Post by gbear605 »

wtracz wrote: post #24
DrScientist wrote: post #14

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.

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.

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).

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#64

Post by contingencies »

guerrilla wrote: post #11
hootbootscoot wrote: post #2

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 cellu…

did you mean Gobeki Tepi?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#65

Post by kiliantics »

austincheney wrote: post #28
1wd wrote: post #4

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...

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.

I believe Afghanistan is also home to the world's largest lithium deposits, which will become increasingly valuable for renewable energy

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#66

Post by mcguire »

avip wrote: post #42

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…

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/article?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 Kültepe/Kaneš and Mari) did not exist in the same way towards the last quarter of the millennium."

Archaeology World seems kind of sketchy.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#67

Post by peeters »

avip wrote: post #56
boomboomsubban wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't see any spectrometer, diffractomer, or xray analysis in that post. Did I miss it somehow ?

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.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#68

Post by ocschwar »

DrScientist wrote: post #14

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.

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.)

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#69

Post by avip »

peeters wrote: post #67
avip wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any spectrometer, diffractomer, or xray analysis in that post. Did I miss it somehow ?

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-bron…

I've linked to it above. It's in Dutch but the analysis is there.

Re: Tin Found in Israel from 3k Years Ago Comes from Cornwall

#70

Post by ocschwar »

rmah wrote: post #40
tssva wrote: post #22

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.

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.

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.
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