Bronze Age copper sources in the Mediterranean : a new approach

Journal article

Abstract:: Efforts by scientists to locate the sources of copper used in ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures through comparative chemical analyses of copper ores and archaeological artifacts have largely failed for various mineralogical and metallurgical reasons. The isotopic composition of lead, an element present in a minor amount in many copper ores and bronze objects, is unchanged through metallurgical processes and may in principle be used to determine the sources of the copper used in Bronze Age artifacts. Results suggest that for Late Bronze Age Crete the Laurion region in Attica, Greece, may have been a more important copper source than Cyprus.

Language:: English
Keywords:: lead isotopes

Cyprus

Crete

Laurium

mines

Attica

artefacts

Greece

Copper sources

Laurion

Bronze Age
Subjects:: Archaeology

Earth sciences

History of the ancient world
UUID:: uuid:f31e7c70-f3c2-442c-a4b7-98f1978bb11c
Local pid:: ora:4452
Deposit date:: 2010-11-16
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_f31e7c70f3c2442ca4b798f1978bb11c

Copyright holder:: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Notes:: The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. Citation: Gale, N. H. & Stos-Gale, Z. A. (1982). 'Bronze Age copper sources in the Mediterranean: a new approach', Science 216(4541), 11-19. [Available at http://www.sciencemag.org/]. This was the pioneering paper which opened up a completely new field of study of Bronze Age archaeology and economics in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

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