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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

#71

Post by mcguire »

netcan wrote: post #5

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 mythic…

"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...

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

#72

Post by cat199 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #47
mhh__ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

'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'

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

#73

Post by mcguire »

contingencies wrote: post #64
guerrilla wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you mean Gobeki Tepi?

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

If I'm reading that correctly, then not Göbekli Tepe; the two phases there are paleolithic-neolithic and "classical".

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

#74

Post by jaratec »

ocschwar wrote: post #70
rmah wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copper was readily availble in cyprus. So, no, that's not what happened.

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

#75

Post by CydeWeys »

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.

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.

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

#76

Post by JoeAltmaier »

CydeWeys wrote: post #75
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.

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…

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?

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

#77

Post by ocschwar »

jaratec wrote: post #74
ocschwar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copper was readily availble in cyprus. So, no, that's not what happened.

Copper was available so long as firewood was available. Copper ore without firewood is of no use.

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

#78

Post by mprev »

gbear605 wrote: post #63
wtracz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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

#79

Post by thrower123 »

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.

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.

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

#80

Post by n4r9 »

everdrive wrote: post #53
ncmncm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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?

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

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