Bronze Age worlds: craft and commerce

TRANSCRIPT

Speakers: Stuart Wyatt (Museum of London) – Chair

Carol Bell (Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

Alison Sheridan (Department of Scottish History & Archaeology)

James Dilley (University of Southampton and Centre for the Archaeology of

Human Origins)

SW: Good evening and welcome to the Museum of London Docklands. My name is Stuart Wyatt

and I am the Portable Antiquities Scheme Finds Liaison Officer for London. I record artefacts

found by members of the public onto the PAS database as part of a national scheme to

record the lost, discarded or hidden objects of our past. We’re sorry that we can’t welcome

you to the museum itself tonight, but we hope to see you in person again in the not too

distant future.

Tonight’s talk is part of a four-part series that runs alongside our Havering Hoard

exhibition, exploring different aspects of life in the Bronze Age. Tonight, we have three

fantastic speakers who will be sharing their perspectives on craft and commerce across the

Bronze Age world.

Firstly, I’d like to introduce Dr Carol Bell. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute

of Archaeology at University College London, a Trustee of the Institute for Archaeo-

metallurgical Studies and the Chair of the British School at Athens. Originally a Natural

Scientist, her research focuses on synthesising trade patterns during the Late Bronze Age

and early Iron Age around the Mediterranean and Europe by applying holistic and

multidisciplinary approaches to data, including metal finds. She has written extensively

about the trade in the raw materials for making bronze, and her current research focuses on

the sources of the silver found in archaeological sites dating to the Bronze and Iron Age.

CB: Well thanks very much for inviting to join you this evening. My area of expertise is trade,

and specifically the trade in metals from the very earliest period to the Iron Age. And what

I’d like to do this evening is to put this hoard in its national and international context, and

the position where it sits in the history in the European Bronze Age.

As you know, the ability to work metals was a major step forward for mankind. The earliest

tools were many of stone, or one or two other materials such as antler or bone. But the

ability to access metals, which took a long time to achieve, and indeed to reach across

Eurasia towards Britain, marked a step change in development. Although copper, silver and

gold had been worked by man earlier, beautiful though they are, the first really useful metal

for making tools and weapons was bronze. And on this opening slide you can see some of

the wonderful bronzes in the Havering Hoard.

So what I’d like to do first then, is to talk about the emergence of bronze-making

technology in the Near East in the fourth millennium BC, and what led up to this. Then I’ll

chart through time the arrival of this technology in Western Europe, by about 2500 BC,

before coming on to the Havering Hoard itself, which dates to the very end of the Late

Bronze Age – about 900 to 800 BC. My next two topics will be the sources of copper and tin

– the raw materials for making bronze – including some very recent work by archaeological

scientists that has shed light on the extent of the early trade networks linking the sources of

these important metals to those that consumed them. I’ll conclude with some brief words on

the practice of hoarding bronze, which appears to be a particularly European phenomenon

in this period, and something that you don’t tend to find in the archaeological record of the

ancient Near East.

As my fellow countryman, Dylan Thomas, said then, “to begin at the beginning”. Let’s start

with the material itself: bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin – or in the very earliest

period, copper and arsenic. In many ways, the invention of bronze is the catalyst for the

broth of the modern world, as it revolutionised the tools available to man. It is more solid

and versatile than any other material used before to manufacture tools and weapons. We

must start this journey with the first evidence of working native copper, which comes from

Neolithic villages in the Fertile Crescent, which I’ve highlighted in the blue circle here. This

comprises basically the cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates Valleys and the highlands of Syria,

Palestine, Turkey and Iran.

Native copper is the copper found in its pure metallic form in nature, and not combined with

any other elements into ores. By the seventh millennium BC, native copper was being

hammered into pendants and pins, for example, and must’ve been regarded as precious or

exotic at first. The exact date when the ability to smelt copper from its ores is not known,

but by the middle of the 4th millennium BC, the abundance of copper objects in the

archaeological record rises sharply and it becomes the preferred metal for blades, axes,

spearheads and other tools.

But copper is a relatively soft metal, and the next technological innovation was to produce

the first bronzes. Perhaps this happened initially due to the presence of arsenic as an

impurity in the smelt when making copper. In any event, bronze-making technology

emerged in Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium BC. Gradually, ancient metallurgists

found that by deliberately adding about 10% of tin to copper to create an alloy, the

properties of that resultant metal were greatly improved – particularly hardness and

durability. This made bronze the superior choice for weapons and tools from then on.

By the time of the Royal Tombs of Ur, in modern Iraq today – around 2500 BC – there is

clear evidence of this intentional alloying to make high-tin bronze, with about 8% tin being

recorded in bronzes there, which could only have been added intentionally. Following this

mastery of bronze production in the Near East, came the adoption of this technology by the

cultures around the sites of origin. The European Bronze Age is therefore typically a bit later

than the Near Eastern Bronze Age; the Near Eastern Bronze Age being about 3000 BC to

1200 BC approximately.

Bronze technology reached Western Europe from the Near East by about 2500 BC and

accessing the raw materials to make bronze probably resulted in the first long-distance

trade networks. This was true even in Mesopotamia, as the land between the Tigris and the

Euphrates in Iraq has no local sources of copper and tin. What it missed in metals, of course,

it more than made up for later with oil, it seems! The trade network that delivered copper

and tin followed rivers overland, and also involved maritime transport by ship, and recent

archaeological work has revealed that some of these maritime routes were open much

earlier than previously thought. For example, Cornish tin travelling to the Eastern

Mediterranean by the thirteenth to twelfth centuries BC.

Sourcing tin to harden bronze was something leaders worried about during the Bronze Age,

as this was vital to create what I like to call “weapons-grade bronze”. Having weapons was

essential to maintaining the power structures that existed then, and that’s true today,

unfortunately, as well. And having access to enough tin in the Bronze Age was probably on a

par with the place oil holds today as a strategic commodity between nations.

The Havering Hoard dates to the tail-end of the European Bronze Age period, just before

bronze was surpassed by iron for making weapons and tools in Britain. Its location

overlooking the course of the Thames made access to trade routes easy and this would’ve

been an important part of why it was where it was. It also exhibits traits that are common to

the Eurasian Bronze Age worlds, for example socketed axes, like this one shown in the left

corner near the map. And this suggests that the community at Havering was able to access

both materials, and to exchange good and ideas over long distances. But I won’t have time

to speak about these beautiful objects – rather, I’ll concentrate now on the raw materials

that made them.

So let’s start with copper. This is a map from a publication a number of my colleagues

produced last year, showing the distribution of Copper Age and Bronze Age mines, as well

as shipwrecks and hoards that have yielded important archaeological evidence about the

Bronze Age. Copper ore bodies, as you can see, are well distributed in Europe, and there is

ample evidence as well of Bronze Age mining in the UK, including Parys Mountain and the

Great Orme in Wales – the red triangles, numbers 3 and 4.

In terms of archaeological evidence of trade, the shipwrecks at Salcombe and Langdon Bay

at each end of the south coast of England – black dots 9 and 10 – have produced valuable

evidence. But perhaps the most important wrecks of all, from the point of view of the

quantity of copper they carried, are the black dots 53 and 54 off the south coast of Turkey,

being the Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya wrecks. Their under investigation has yielded

literally tons of copper and tin ingots that were en route to market, dating to 1300 and

1200 BC respectively. Shipwrecks such as these are an archaeologist’s dream, and shed

important light on which goods travelled together with one cargo, and how big each cargo

was. Equally, hoards such as Havering are important archaeological discoveries that help us

uncover the past, as their sealed context that were intentionally buried at a specific time. I’ll

come back to Havering later.

For the mo, you can see from the map, hoards containing bronze appear to be a specific

feature of the European Bronze Age – they are much less prevalent in the Middle East. And

even though this map was only published last year, it’s already out of date, and I’ve had to

add Havering in blue, just south of the black dot number 8, which is the Must Farm site in

East Anglia.

Turning next to tin; tin ore bodies are much less common in nature than copper ores, as can

be seen from this map. Deposits in Uzbekistan – number 43, Karnab – and Tajikistan -

which is the Mushiston deposit, number 44 - in Central Asia were important suppliers to the

Near East from the Middle Bronze Age onwards. Importantly, this trade is documented in

texts on clay tablets, from which we can track the tin from its arrival in Nuzi in Iran, to

Kültepe in modern Turkey. Turkey itself also has evidence of Bronze Age tin mining, for

example number 37 on this map, the Kestel area.

I mentioned Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya shipwrecks off the south coast of Turkey. These

contained the majority of the Bronze Age tin ingots found so far, as well as the copper

ingots I mentioned earlier. But tin ingots have also been found off-shore Haifa in Israel, and

also on land in Mochlos in Crete. Very recent scientific work using tin isotope composition

and trace element analysis suggest that Cornish tin mines are the most likely suppliers for

the 1300 and 1200 BC tin ingots found off Haifa. This recent scientific publication therefore

has made us rethink how early Britain may have engaged in long-distance maritime trade

routes that spanned the entire Mediterranean. Indeed, when I wrote my PhD, Cornwall was

dismissed as a potential tin source into the Mediterranean basin this early. So even in that

space of time, things have moved on.

So turning finally then, to hoards. The existence of large hoards of broken metal objects

became increasingly common in Europe from the mid second millennium BC onwards, and

this continued to the very end of the Bronze Age – the period of Havering. This contrasts

with the Near East, where metal largely remained in circulation, or is occasionally found in

religious structures. In East Asia too; bronze is more often found in funerary or grave

contexts there. So this appears to be a particularly European phenomenon.

And the Havering Hoard, which is made up of four individual deposits, is fairly typical of

European Bronze Age hoards of this period. Only 61 out of the total 392 bronze objects

were actually intact or complete objects. 42% of the objects were tools, 39% metal working

material, 15% were weapons, and the other 4% were ornaments or fixtures and fittings. The

excavators believe that the majority of these objects had been deliberately broken, perhaps

making them easier to carry, or indeed to melt to make new objects. Why they were buried

is unclear. Perhaps they were buried by a bronze smith, in the expectation of later retrieving

them to cast new objects. Perhaps they were simply a store of value, buried in turbulent

times for security – again, the intention of retrieving them must have been there. We are of

course in the period that pre-dated coinage, and lumps of metal were often used as store of

value in the period leading up to the invention of coinage in this way.

So perhaps we’ll never know the answer to the question of why the hoards were buried in

the first place, but so much more will be revealed from this material in due course. I hope

I’ve given you an idea of what archaeological science can do to help with this, and certainly

it an help to work out where the tin and copper came from to make these objects. But I’d

like to leave you with the words of Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England, when

the announcement of the hoard was made in the first place, about the importance of the

hoard:

“In a year when a global mining company has destroyed a 46,000 year old aboriginal

heritage site in Western Australia, without actually breaking Western Australian heritage

laws, it’s very, very encouraging that here in the UK our law requires developers – in this

case a company intending to develop a gravel pit – to employ professional archaeologists to

excavate and document any site before development proceeds.”

As Duncan said, the finds have already taught us a great deal about this distant age, and

ongoing analysis and public outreach means that many more people will benefit from this

window into the past thanks to this example of successful development-led archaeology. I

very much hope that you will get to see the wonderful exhibition at the Museum of London

Docklands when it reopens, and I for one will also make the trip to see these beautiful

objects when they reach their permanent home in the Havering Museum in due course.

Thank you very much.

SW: Our next speaker is Dr Alison Sheridan. She Fellow of the British Academy and was, until last

year, the Principal Curator of Early Prehistory at National Museums Scotland, and now is a

Research Associate with the Department of Scottish History & Archaeology. She is a

prehistorian, focusing on the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age of Britain and Ireland

and specialising in ceramics, stone axe heads and jewellery of jet and jet-like materials,

gold, amber and faience. And she is is at present the Current Archaeology’s Archaeologist of

the Year 2020!

AS: Well hello everybody! I’m here a long way away from you, up in Edinburgh. And I’m here to

talk about what the Havering Hoard tells us about Britain’s links with the continent during

the Late Bronze Age, and how this fits in with a broader picture of cross-Channel

interactions over the course of the Bronze Age. It seems an apposite time to do this, just

time before Brexit finally kicks in.

Among the many fascinating aspects of the Havering Hoard is the fact that several of the

objects - including this terret, or a rein ring, which is one of a pair - seem to have been

imported from the continent, in this case probably from Northern France. And this bracelet

here is thought to have come from somewhere on what’s now the border between France

and Germany. One fragment of a sword is of a type known only from the Czech Republic,

and there are several copper ingots in the hoard that are thought to have come from the

Alps. And there are also quite a few objects which are of Continental style, even if they

weren’t actual imports, including this so-called carp’s tongue sword, which is a type of

sword that was popular in North West France, and also this double-edged razor for shaving,

which was very much a Continental fashion.

So clearly the people who deposited the hoard were very well-connected with their

counterparts across the Channel. And in fact by about 900 or 800 BC when the hoard was

deposited, Southeast England and Northern France were very closely connected, forming a

kind of cultural province where people shared the same kinds of pottery and fashions in

prestigious items, and regularly exchanged goods. It’s very likely that the tin from

Southwest England that Carol talked about was being exported at this time.

Evidence for these links from other sites apart from Havering include this French-style

bronze and amber pin that you see in the middle of this picture here, hat was found in the

Thames. And we know, not just from the Havering Hoard, that there were links with further

flung parts of the Continent and beyond at the time. So for example, these beads that were

found in a grave at Stotfold in Bedfordshire, had come all the way from Frattesina in North

Italy. While on the right here, this tiny little blue bead which is less than a centimetre across,

that was found in Adabroc on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, is made from glass

that was made either in the Eastern Mediterranean or in the Near East. So that’s a

phenomenal distance for these things to have travelled.

In fact, we can trace cross-Channel connections right back to the beginning of the Bronze

Age, and indeed before that – long before that. But before sketching these out for you, I just

need to tell you what kind of boats they would’ve been using during the Late Bronze Age,

and luckily one survives from the Middle Bronze Age – this is the so-called Dover Boat,

found in Dover – and this has been made from sewn plants. And this would have been

sturdy enough to be used to ferry cargo such as tin across the Channel. And we also know

that some boats didn’t quite make it, because on the seabed divers have found what’s likely

to have been the cargo of at least two boats that went down between 1300 and 1200 BC:

one at Langdon Bay off Dover, and other at Salcombe in Devon. And these finds included

ingots of tin, Cornish tin, and even an agricultural tool from Sicily. So these give us a

fantastic little snapshot frozen in time of what was travelling around and where.

In looking at cross-Channel connections, let’s go back to around 2500 BC, when the so-

called Beaker People arrived from the Continent. This chap that you can see here is the

famous Amesbury Archer, and he was buried near Stone Henge in a very rich grave. Isotopic

analysis of the enamel in his teeth was able to reveal that he wasn’t a local – he hadn’t

grown up in the area. And in fact it said that he probably came from as far away as Bavaria

or Switzerland, and that’s a heck of a long way to come in the day before EasyJet and trains

and all that! So it would’ve been shank’s pony and a boat. But also, DNA analysis has shown

that other so-called Beaker People will have come from elsewhere. So this young lady here,

who was buried at Achavanich, way up in the far north of Scotland, is the daughter or the

granddaughter of people who had come across from the Netherlands.

As to why these people came, well it’s probably for a variety of reasons. So the Amesbury

Archer will have been drawn to Stone Henge, which would’ve been one of the wonders of the

world at that time, and he probably came over to join in the winter solstice festivals there.

But also at the time, we know that young men used to do heroic journeys – so if you were a

member of the elite and well-to-do, you would go off and go on a long, long journey, and

then you’d usually come back and tell all of your friends and impress them. But for some

reason this guy didn’t make it back, and he died in Wessex.

Other so-called Beaker People were certainly prospectors for metal, and in fact these were

the people who introduced the technology of metal to Britain and Ireland at the time, and

the metals concerned were copper and gold. So we know that these people would have

opened up a copper mine at a place called Ross Island in the southwest of Ireland. Later on

in around 2200 BC other prospectors, probably from Central Europe, managed to find that

in Southwest England in Cornwall and Devon, there’s one of the biggest deposits of tin in

the whole of Europe, and they certainly exploited that to some great degree.

And by around 2000 BC, the people who were buried around Stone Henge must’ve managed

to corner the market in this. They were entrepreneurs, so they were able to control the flow

of tin from Southwest England down into the Continent, and they probably also exported

copper as well. And because of this they got incredibly rich, and they showed off their

wealth in the things that they buried people with. So here is the grave at Bush Barrow, and it

was a man – a very, very important man – who’d been buried with a great array of objects,

including a ceremonial mace and a couple of long daggers. And one of these daggers was of

Breton style – it was Armorican style, so if you were to go to Brittany at the same time,

around 200 BC, the elite there would have been using daggers of the same sort. And at the

top right you can see tiny little gold pins that were set into the hilt of this dagger. So this is

kind of uber-bling, and it shows us that the elite in Wessex were very much closely linked to

their counterparts in Brittany.

And then over time you can see how they were able to take advantage of Continental

fashions. So from around 1900 BC, people in Britain and Ireland were using faience, and

faience is an early kind of glass. And in fact this would’ve been the earliest blue anything –

let alone jewellery, the earliest blue anything that people were using in Northwest Europe

about this time. Faience is particularly interesting because it’s a technology that developed

in Egypt and Mesopotamia, way back in about 5000 BC, and people used to think that

people came from Egypt to Britain with their pockets full of beads for the natives, but that’s

not true. The know-how for making faience arrived in Britain and Ireland as a result of links

with Central Europe – those same people who had probably come looking for tin, and

finding it. And faience is very interesting because it represents a sort of magical transition

from the raw materials which were essentially sand and copper and plant ash, to this jewel-

like substance. And it may well be that these were used as amulets to protect the living and

the dead.

And we know from the work of Stuart Needham, who was a wonderful curator at the British

Museum who’s now retired, and he’s a Bronze Age specialist. And he was able to say that by

about 750 BC, the centres of power had actually shifted to the south coast. And here, the

people who are in control of the movement of metals – particularly in from Cornwall – were

in very close links with their counterparts along the Channel coast to the south side. So

these people would not only indulge in trade, but also to oil the wheels of trade, they

indulge in sort of drinks. It’s a little bit like when a trade delegation these days goes to

China, where they will be wined and dined to oil the wheels of trade. And so you can see a

whole series of incredibly precious cups made of gold, made of amber, made of shale, and

in Switzerland they’ve even got one made of silver. And you can image the elite sailing

across the Channel and then indulging in these feasts, where they would drink – we don’t

know what, some kind of alcohol, possibly mead at the time – with their counterparts on the

other side.

Also we know that they were using Continental style pins in Britain at the time here. So you

can see these at the top left. And also, another aspect of these cross-Channel links is that

people were exporting fine jewellery and other things from Britain to the Continent. So these

are composite necklaces – they’re a little bit like lucky charm necklaces – and they were

made of rare and exotic items and materials, such as jet, amber, tin and faience. And at the

bottom right of this slide you can see one of these necklaces that was found in Exloo in the

northern Netherlands. Most of the beads in this necklace will have been made in southern

England, including the tin beads there, and the faience beads. And what the people in the

Netherlands did was then to add bits of amber that they had probably picked up on the

coast of the Netherlands.

So we refer to this as sort of supernatural power-dressing. If they believed that all of these

substances could protect the wearer, then by burying people with necklaces like this as they

did do in southern England, it may well be that they were protecting them on their

dangerous journey into the afterlife. And we can see that by around 1500 BC, the people in

Southeast England were so closely linked to the people on the other side of the Channel that

they were sharing rites in funerary practices, and also sharing the same kinds of pottery. So

these people will have been related to each other, they will have gone to and fro across the

Channel quite regularly, and they shared their styles of pottery and how to deal with the

dead.

The most extraordinary aspect of exporting things to the Continent around this time is – we

can see in this amazing sky disc from Nebra, in what used to be East Germany, and it’s on

display in a fantastic museum in Halle at the moment. Analysis by our German colleagues

showed that the gold and the tin on this so-called sky disc had come from Cornwall, which

is a heck of a long way away. And what this sky disc is, is it’s a representation of the sun

and the moon and certain stars, and also at the bottom you can see a boat, which is thought

to be the sky-boat that was used to transport the sun across the heavens. And this

particular object could well have been used for calendrical observations and for marking

time. But it’s a one-off object, and it’s completely amazing – and it’s even more amazing to

know that the gold and the tin in this had come from Cornwall.

The period between 1500 and 1000 BC – that’s when the Dover boat was in use, and the

Salcombe and Langdon Bay shipwrecks happened. And here, from a hoard from Burton in

Wales, we see an exquisite set of golden jewellery, including this little rolled up amazing

bracelet – it’s very, very tiny - and this is matched perfectly in the Salcombe Hoard. So we

think this was an exotic thing that was imported from somewhere on the Continent, and it

was exquisitely well-made, with twisted gold wore that had been soldered together. So it

just goes to show the quality of the material that was crossing the Channel around this time.

I just really want to end by showing you a picture of another amazing boat – this is a

representation of a boat that was made of shale, and it’s got gold and tin added to it. And

along the top, you might be able to see, the circular designs are thought to represent

shields. So, as it were, this is a representation of a boat around 1400 BC that would have

ferried armed people across the channel. And just as we are going into Brexit, let’s look

forward to maintaining these maritime connections that are millennia old with our

Continental chums, and let’s stay friends with them!

Thank you very much for listening, and I hope this has given you some inkling into the

long-term background of the incredible Continental connections of the Havering Hoard.

Thank you very much. Bye!

SW: Our final speaker this evening is Dr James Dilley of the University of Southampton and the

Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins. He is an experimental archaeologist who

specialises in prehistoric technologies, including flint knapping & bronze casting. And in his

own words, wants to “encourage people of all ages to learn about ancient crafts by bringing

back to life our ancestors skills and knowledge from the primitive past.”

JD: Hello, I’m James Dilley from the University of Southampton and Ancient Craft. I’ll be giving a

talk on creating a Bronze Age hoard, but I won’t be going over the whole creation of a whole

hoard because I’ll be here all day, and I’ve been restricted to 20 minutes, which is always a

challenge! But I’m going to mainly focus towards the end on axes, because axes tend to

feature a little bit more in the Havering Hoard.

But before I even talk about metal, I’m actually going to look at another material that helps

make any kind of metal work, really – certainly in prehistory – and that’s charcoal. And my

argument has always been that without charcoal, the Bronze Age just wouldn’t have

happened in the way that we expect it, or the way that we have it now. Charcoal is one of

those materials which is almost always overlooked – it’s just assumed, really, that it’s always

there or would’ve always been there and that it’s easy to produce. But actually charcoal

involves a little bit more than that, and it’s a process that many people might not really

understand in the way that it’s created.

To produce charcoal you need a large amount of wood – in the case of producing charcoal

on a more industrial level, several hundred kilos of wood - that’s carefully prepared, cut and

stacked, as you can see with these images on the left with this gentleman who is stacking

the timber, and the image below that of this huge heap of stacked timber. There’s an awful

lot of effort that goes into it, and these images are of charcoal burners from the 18th and

19th centuries. We don’t know what charcoal burning would have looked like in the Bronze

Age, but it’s quite likely that it would’ve been very similar. We really have very little evidence

that has survived in the soil, and that’s why it seems reasonable to suggest that it might

have looked something like this because for these charcoal burners, their clamp or turf

clamp is above ground so all you’d get is a burning patch that’s not particularly deep into

the ground, and that’s about it. All of the charcoal would be raked up and taken away

afterwards.

The image I’ve got of these two gentlemen next to this hut I quite like, because it shows

part of a camp around a charcoal burning site. And it is possibly – if they’re clothing was a

little bit different, and if they didn’t have that sack that says Joseph Oakes on it – perhaps

the sort of scene that we might have seen from a Bronze Age charcoal burning. But really for

the whole process you need experience, lots of axes, and time and space to produce all of

this charcoal that’s then used for so many other parts of the metal working process that I’ll

mention later.

But what about these elusive crafts people? Well, a bit like the charcoal, we just don’t have a

great deal of evidence of them that’s come from the ground. We have little bots of their

material, in terms of their tools and equipment that has survived, but there is not huge

amounts of it – certainly not in comparison to the huge amounts of metal work that we have

to go alongside these people. And there are a few possible reasons for this: metal workers

could’ve been travelling crafts people, they never really stayed in one place for a very long

time, so they took their equipment and materials with them, they set up for a short period

of time in a settlement, and then moved on. So they weren’t in one place long enough to

create large amounts of waste, or a big burning patch, or a furnace that might leave a

stronger archaeological trace. They just appear almost like ghosts, which makes it quite

frustrating really, to try and work out how they went through the process of making and

preparing.

It’s also possible that metal working sites, once the metal worker had moved on, were

cleared out, either by the occupants of the space or the settlement, or the metal workers

themselves cleared out the space afterwards because there may have been some social

construct about clearing up after them. We really don’t know. But it just meant that that

space that was probably set aside for a metal worker when they came through was then

turned back into a domestic space, or some other activity space, so the evidence of metal

working was just removed. But it’s also possible that metal workers behaved purposefully in

a way that left very little trace, even because they were worried about people learning about

their craft, or because objects and consumables and materials were valuable. So they’d go

through what was left and pick out everything, and throw away or dispose of the rest. We

really don’t know, and it’s quite likely that it was a combination of all of those things.

But I’ve got some pictures of some of the things that have survived, and for the image in the

top left, you have what appears to be an upside down Dennis the Menace catapult – that’s

actually a pipe from a split branch of a tree. It would have been the other way up, with the

trunk coming out of the two branches. That pipe would then feed almost into the furnace,

and connected to the two ends of them would be a pair of bag bellows, which probably

would’ve looked very similar to the bag bellows that the Hadza blacksmith is working on in

the bottom right. Very simple, they have no valves, they just open and close at the top and

they clap together with the sticks in the top that mean you don’t have to gather them up at

the top, which would be a bit awkward otherwise. And that’s what we’ve got in the picture in

the top left, those two set of clap sticks with holes through them.

Below that, we have a clay tuyere – it is that that actually pokes into the furnace, otherwise

the wooden pipe would simply burn away. You can see it’s got the vitrified nozzle on there

that shows that it’s come into contact with some intense heat at some point. Bottom middle

is this crucible with three little legs, which is a reconstruction of one of the types of

crucibles from the Dainton metal working site in Devon, which again had a reasonable

amount of metal working waste, but limited actual evidence of where they were conducting

the process. Other crucibles may have looked more like this one, which is just a dish as you

can see, it doesn’t have legs at all. And it was this kind of crucible that I used for the

Havering Hoard exhibition video, with wooden tongs. But these are really hard to grip on to

when this is over a thousand degrees and the wooden tongs are starting to burn away. And

the point where it makes contact and friction burns away instantly, so you’re always losing

that friction which makes it really difficult!

I’ve got this picture of the African blacksmith, rather than a bronze caster, because I think

it’s an interesting comparison. And proxy environments and situations like this can be

helpful, but proxy environments and situations are very rarely even near perfect, so you still

have to be a little wary of how you use examples like this. But it’s the fact that he has set

himself up here with a limited amount of tools; with a basket of charcoal and a very small

actual furnace burning space, with this young lad here sat on top of what appear to be bag

bellows, interestingly, closing his eyes from the sparks. And he appears to be sat on this

built structure here of unfired clay, which again archaeologically just would not survive – the

lower part might, but once again, that would be fragmentary. So once the metal worker has

gone, taking all of his tools, the structure is either broken down, falls down or is reused for

something else, the evidence of him being there in the ground would be very, very limited.

In terms of me creating one of these spaces, I’ve set up this process several times for

filming, including for the Havering Hoard video, but really I’ve got on pretty well with just a

hole in the ground –you don’t have to line it with clay necessarily, at all. And it’s that that I

find particularly interesting, because although clay is a fantastic material for reflecting the

heat back inside into the furnace, you don’t need it. And it’s that where perhaps we’d have

perhaps greater evidence of a furnace – it does survive occasionally, but just not often

enough.

And you can see from the picture in the top left – that was the same metal working site as

the one directly below it, only a few weeks later. So it just shows you that a site that has got

what appears to be a lot of materials and activity, once all of the useable objects and

materials are taken away, just turns back into used ground. There’s a little bit of a

depression in the middle where the furnace was, but that’s it. It’s otherwise almost

completely vanished, which is again, perhaps why we’re not finding any evidence. You might

get tiny amounts of slag or copper prills, which are tiny droplets, maybe some ceramics –

but if the place is dug out or swept and reused, you’re just not going to find very much at

all.

In terms of the axes, and I know I mentioned at the start how the axes were going to be my

main focus; we’ve got several types of axe in the Havering Hoard. Quite a few socketed

axes, which have been made in a three-part mould - two sides of bivalve with a core in the

middle that the bronze would be cast around. But we also have these winged axes which

generally are thought to be intrusive from the European Continent, but we do have half a

mould from Kent which is part of a hoard that is mostly winged axes. In terms of the mould

material, we’ve got as I mentioned, a copper alloy mould; there’s stone in the upper middle

of the slide, or the ceramic moulds – both the replicas at the top and the actual example

from Jarlshof in the Shetland Isles for another socketed axe of the Meldreth type.

But all of these moulds, whatever material you used, would have to be carefully prepared,

even before casting. And there are pros and cons with all of them – some of them take a

long time to prepare; some of them like the stone moulds in particular, you can only source

that stone from very particular localities, so you might turn to clay or copper alloy as an

alternative just because you don’t live near something like soapstone or a fine-grained

sandstone.

I’ve tried all three types in the past, but recently a challenge I’ve set for myself is to create a

copper alloy mould. I started, for my first challenge, with a copper ally palstave mould, but I

really wanted to try a copper alloy socketed axe mould. You can see from the picture here,

which was taken last night because that’s when I tried it for the first time, just before this

talk – leaving it to the last minute, but I thought this would be a nice addition – that the axe

head came out really well. It proved a little bit tricky to get the socket out of the axe, but

you can see from the lump of metal right at the top, which is the sprue, actually looks

almost identical to archaeological examples which is really interesting. It actually took very

little effort to remove – a few taps with a hammer and it broke off.

But I actually have the mould here next to me so you can get a closer view. It is copper alloy

– really quite heavy – and if I open it up, you can see the axe on the inside, which is really

quite blackened from the cast that has gone straight into it. But without the core, you can

see the registration ridge around the outside that helps it lock together, and that’s what real

examples looked like. When it’s in place, it’s not going to come apart easily. My core, which

I then pop straight into the mould, and that’s not coming out very easily. And that should

help line it up, and then it’s just bound. The axe which came out, which I have here, it’s a

good example of a South Eastern type of axe head, with a good, carefully positioned socket

– there’s no holes in it – so a really good cast.

It’s possible that many of the axes in the Havering Hoard were made in moulds like this, but

it’s likely that many of them were made in clay, maybe even stone moulds as well. It will

hopefully be possible in the future to actually differentiate the axes that were made in

different moulds due to very subtle details, perhaps hammer marks in certain places where

they were trying to break them out of the mould.

Another important part of the process if actually looking at how the axes are used once

they’ve been cast. I think that’s a particularly important part of the process. So we’ve got

these two real examples towards the bottom – the one on the bottom left and the one on

the bottom right with these two-part handles, with a picture of me in between using an axe

that’s set on its side as an adze, with a single-part wooden handle.

As far as I’m aware, we’ve only got two examples of two-part wooden handles and there are

quite a few examples – particularly from the earlier Bronze Age – of the single-part wooden

handles. The downside is that once you find them, well that’s all great but you generally

don’t get a lot of these perfect number 7 or even right angle shapes that are naturally

growing, certainly not a right angle that’s nice and straight, with no knots or weaknesses

that would cause the axe handle to fail. So I can totally understand why people were relying

on these two-part handles, because once you’ve cut down these perfect shapes, already

you’re still going to need axe handles, and you can’t just walk woodlands forever looking

for that perfect handle! So if you’re making these two part handles they’re very, very

effective. And the beauty is, with a two-part handle, if one component breaks you just have

to replace that one half, not the whole piece. But there are still pros and cons.

But once the axe head is actually cast, with many examples it appears that very little effort

has actually gone into doing too much more with them. You can see with this one, we’ve got

quite a significant what’s called a flash, which is that casting frill around the outside that’s

gone beyond the shape of the axe where the liquid bronze has travelled. Once that’s

knocked off with a hammer and sharpened, sometimes you get a little bit of evidence to

remove the flash around the outside; sometimes some of this material from the top that you

can see, but in many cases not. People are just putting an edge on these, work hardening

them to compress the crystalline structure, so that the blade doesn’t buckle, and that’s

about it.

And it seems likely that many axes in hoards were not even used. Some were, but it appears

likely that many weren’t – they were just there possibly even as a stock. Who knows? And I

guess that’s the mystery behind these hoards, as to whether they were thrown away – not

likely! – or whether they were placed there to be hidden for the metal worker’s stock, or

perhaps for some ritual or ceremonial purpose, which in my opinion is often the cop out

phrase, but it’s very difficult to prove either way.

I’ve got this network to really show some of those materials that I’ve mentioned going into

the process, with our LBA, Late Bronze Age hoard in the middle, with the nice picture of the

axe. We’ve got the ceramics going into it, for the moulds and the clay that feeds into them.

We’ve got in the top left corner, my green broccoli – well they’re meant to be trees – that

require axes going to them to actually cut down the trees, and then wood coming back for

the handles. Wood going into ceramics to fire them, and then some wood going across to

the charcoal that I’ve already mentioned. And then the charcoal feeding back into the hoard

to help with the casting process. But the wood can go straight over the top to the other side,

where we have the mining and smelting, because you’d need wood either to help prop the

occasional gallery up – although using props is quite rare, really – but people are generally

using things like gutters to help wash the ore in open cast pits, or to make wooden tools

like shovels as we have from places like Alderley Edge.

From the mining process you have an output of copper and tin – Cu for copper and Sn for

tin. And in Late Bronze Age hoards like the Havering Hoard you have these great big copper

bun ingots that sometimes go straight into the hoard; they’re not being mixed with tin,

which is why they go directly in. But sometime they would be added with tin – 10% tin to

90% copper – sometimes with some lead as well, and that would go straight into the hoard.

And as well as that we have damaged metal work as the final thing. For many Late Bronze

Age hoards, they are made up almost exclusively of damaged metal work, and in some

cases there are complete objects as well. Some of that damaged metal work has been

broken down into convenient sized pieces to fit back into a crucible, so it can be cast out

into complete objects; but sometimes those objects are just put straight into a hoard

without being made into a finished and complete object. And some of those pieces probably

came out as well, so there’s this constant flow of materials that are coming in and out. The

likelihood, for this entire network, is there’d be many, many people involved with lots of

skill sets, over a very wide geographic area. Some of it we can pick out archaeologically

using different scientific methods, but many of them we just can’t. And that I guess is some

of the process that we have to infer, which just makes it a bit frustrating!

So I hope that’s been interesting, and you got a small treat in showing the actual casting

process for the axe head that I showed. So it’s not quite the end, but you can see that I’ve

cast in to this – and I appreciate that it’s not a Late Bronze Age pot for any ceramicists out

there, who are instantly going to send in the complaint postcard! That’s what was available.

As you can see I’m using steel tongs, because I’m more interested in the process, rather

than how good Late Bronze Age pots are at holding sand and a mould in them!

So you can see that I’ve poured into it, and I’m unwinding it to see whether the axe head

came out OK. And I’m about to use my Late Bronze Age socketed hammer and a tanged

chisel as well, which is classically a wood working tool but is very good for this particular

part of the process because that mould is really, really hot at the moment. Even with gloves,

if I held that in my hand the heat would come through very, very quickly. Apologies for my

forehead there, but the excitement of opening it up meant that I just had to get it out of the

way quickly, without worrying about cameras and things like that!

So it’s nearly there, trying to wiggle it out. A little bit more effort – this is the point when

you just throw it one the ground and hope that it falls out! But no. Of course, you have the

axe on one side, and hopefully it’s good on the other side as well with no holes or gaps

where the bronze hasn’t filled. So you have to turn it over and give it a good whack from the

other side, and out it drops. That’s a south eastern socketed axe.

There was no damage or warping or cracking in the mould at all, so it seems very likely that

I’d be able to cast straight into it again, which is interesting because that’s one of the pros

of these copper alloy moulds over something like clay which usually gets damaged or

broken. These copper alloy moulds seem to have a lot of reusability to them, which I’ll

explore a bit more. You can see from the picture in the bottom left, where I have a sort of

unusual expression – let’s say happy! – with the visor over my head, with it absolutely

throwing it down. You can probably see the streaks around me – those are rain drops

hammering down around me! But with a palstave axe – that was the first time I ever

attempted that, and I was absolutely delighted that it came out with a good axe on the

inside.

And this is going to be an ongoing process, so if you found this interesting, because it has

been a very much condensed talk and overview of the metal workers process, do follow me

on social media and on my website. I will constantly, almost on a daily basis, post on these

processes and how things are going, which will hopefully lead to a publication at some point

– we’ll see! So I hope that you’ve found that interesting, and I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

SW: SW: I'd like to thank the three speakers for their wonderful talks this evening, and we are

now going to move into to the discussion phase of evening.

So one of the things I was going to ask you about was that James, you talked about the

charcoal being really important part of the equation in the Bronze Age, and Alison also

talked about the southeast of England being where the focus of control of the metal working

areas was. Is it due to the number of trees in the forest that we have in the southeast of

England? Because the charcoal production being so important, and the metal copper and the

tin can be moved around more easily than timber. Do you think this is one of the reasons

why the southeast of England became a focus for this?

JD: Possibly. And I guess this is where the some of the difficulty in trying to trace the charcoal

production and exchange of the materials in general. Because of course, we have certain

areas in the UK that are quite forested now, but some of that's either medieval forest or

much, much later. I think as I laid out in the talk that I gave, it just seems likely that these

metal workers are really quite light in the way they move - they're not basing themselves in

one place too heavily just because they're not leaving enough material. So how charcoal

producers fit into that equation, whether they are as semi-sedentary or even most totally

mobile like metal workers or whether they move around with them. That's another potential

there.

It's very difficult to trace really and I guess that's the frustrating part of the process. I wish I

could say, you know, this is exactly how long they would have to spend in one place to

produce X kilos of charcoal and then you could smelt so much copper or you could cast so

many axes, but it's just not quite possible at the moment. We really need a full study where

you lop down a load of trees with bronze axes and go through the whole process, which is

something I'm thinking about and looking into going into, but not just yet.

But even then, the likelihood is if you get any kind of evidence of metal working, whether it

be smelting directly from mining or whether there are bits of casting involved in that

process, then you know you're going to have, almost certainly, charcoal producers nearby

because, you know, there would have been a lot of woodland around - there would have

been areas that wouldn't have been as well. But you're not going to get too many areas

where there is absolutely no forest at all. And for a process like that we're not necessarily

just producing the objects but renewing the objects and recasting them, you're going to

need that raw material.

SW: Do you how much area of managed forestry you'd need really, to do it?

JD: Again, it really depends on the age of the woodlands and what kind of species have been in

or involved in the process. But having spoken to a couple of charcoal makers recently, the

actual yield you get really ranges and the oldest recorded charcoal production methods

could sometimes get a yield of around 50% charcoal. But in the Bronze Age, it may well have

been less. It may have been 40 or 30% but they were still using turf clamps, so it's not

totally unreasonable, that it's around 50%. The larger the kiln and or the larger the quantity

of wood the more efficient it's going to be. So if you've got, say 100kg of timber, you're

going to get about 50kg of charcoal. So that's quite a reasonable amount of charcoal, but

how long is that going to last one or two individuals metal working? Not very long.

So for that 100kg of timber, you're probably not looking at a huge amount of area – we’ll be

talking metres. Because if you're cutting down very large ash trees or quite densely packed

hazel or beech, the wood is really heavy, so it's not going to be a serious amount of land.

It’s probably worth pointing out that land investment in terms of going into charcoal

production is probably far less impactful than something like farming, and the land required

for farming and settlement.

AS: And if I could chip in, you're talking about the actual movement of metals and I don't really

think that the availability of charcoal would have been a controlling factor as to who and

where controlled the flow of metal. I was talking about the people who are buried in the area

around Stonehenge and essentially, these were entrepreneurs. So I think the hard work of

actually creating initially the ingots, like the tin ingots, would have been done in Cornwall

and possibly Devon as well.

It's all to do with the skill of controlling that flow from the Southwest of England into the

rest of Britain and Ireland and down into the continent. So it's not controlled by the nitty

gritty of how you make the metal in the first place. And also, I suppose as you move on in

time, you're moving around because you're recycling metal so that you will have a stock that

can be moved and shifted.

CB: I think that's a very important point, actually. And what you tend to find across the whole of

Eurasia is that the first sort of purification, if you like, of the metal is done, the other mine,

which means that you're shifting far less material around the place. And that’s what was so

exciting for me to share with everybody in this talk is the fact that now ingots off the coast

of Israel – tin ingots - are demonstrably coming from the UK. Now, that doesn't mean that

one individual got on at Falmouth or something and went all the way to Haifa. I think it

probably doesn't mean that, but it means that this intricate network of traders handing

material on, exchanging tin perhaps, for other things that were needed.

And so it goes on hand to hand, maybe a hundred mile stretch at a time if it's going over

land; maybe a bit longer if it's going by ship. I don't imagine it as being somebody going all

the way from Cornwall to Israel. But it's terrific that scientific archaeology has enabled us to

actually pinpoint some of that factually, rather than having the conjecture of “where does

the tin come from” that when I was writing my PhD, that was the great mystery because it

was impossible at that point to pin down where the tin was coming from. So that's a terrific

piece of news.

And if I may - something that I didn't have time to go into in my talk is the fact that in the

ancient Near East, there are plenty of texts that actually mention the tin trade and you can

learn an awful lot from what was found in merchant dwellings in Ugarit - literally hundreds

of tablets found in the houses of individuals, we know them by name. And bit by bit, you

can piece together who was trading tin with whom, and what the nature of that trade was.

So, terrific when you’ve got texts like that - we haven't got them for the UK, unfortunately.

But we have to use science alongside technological analysis and that sort of thing to build

our picture for us.

AS: I think we're so lucky to have the shipwreck evidence as well, not just here in Britain, but

also something like the Uluburun wreck just shows how much material would be moving

around at any one time.

CB: Absolutely. And the beauty of the Uluburun wreck is the ratio of copper ingots to tin ingots

by weight in it is exactly what you need for what I call weapons-grade bronze. 10:1 – ten

copper to one tin, which is absolutely terrific really. It just shows the scale of trade in about

1300 BC, which is amazing I think, to most people to realise that cargoes on that scale were

moving.

SW: We talked about these big trading networks, but do we know what was coming the other

way? If the tin and the copper was going out this country, and we're also producing the

faience and stuff here. What was actually coming back into the country, do we have any

idea?

AS: It's harder to tell for the early period, but certainly I mentioned the glass beads, like the

bead from Adabroc and the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides which will have come from

the Eastern Mediterranean or the Near East. So, certainly in the in the Middle and Late

Bronze Age, we know that the glass beads are coming from a very, very long way away and

there will have been other material as well. The Roman writers were very interested in the tin

trade and what was exported from Britain, and I can't actually remember what they said was

imported into Britain at the time. I don't know if you know, Carol?

CB: No I don’t, but I imagine that once the Romans had their foothold, they’d be wanting their

creature comforts. I think some of the Vindolanda texts up on Hadrian's Wall - they're

sending for all sorts of things from whom -perhaps we could think of wine arriving in

amphorae, and that disgusting fish sauce they like - Garum - also coming in amphorae. But

so much we can't see, and I think part of the reason that we focus so much on pottery and

metals and some of the precious beads and so on, is that not very often do things like

textiles survive, or indeed the sort of agricultural crops that may have moved around as

well.

Perhaps my favourite quote from a Roman source is Julius Caesar himself in the Gallic wars

before, of course, Britain was pretty colonised. And he says, “No one except traders go

there”. So it's telling that even then that Roman traders, or traders from the continent were

coming to Britain to fetch something, and chances are tin would have been one of those

products.

SW: I was going to ask about the trading networks as well. So we've got the trading networks

across the Channel, but are there any other trading networks, like from the North of England

going across the North Sea, or is it all coming across all coming across from the Channel

and then working his way up the coast? Because I know that later on in the in the medieval

period there's quite a lot of that North Sea trading going on. I just wondered if there was

anything in the Bronze Age or was it all coming up through the South of England?

AS: I think you raise a really, really interesting question there because people have tried to argue

for direct links between Britain and Scandinavia across the North Sea for many periods,

including the Neolithic period. But it's actually very, very difficult to find a substantial

amount of evidence for direct links. Certainly, we know that the south coast of Britain was

really, really important. So, for example, in Kent there was a site that has produced a

Trevisker-style Bronze Age urn that would date to about 1500 BC and it's implying that

maybe tin was going along the southern coast of England and was being moved out from

Kent. We also have evidence for people coming in from the Continent at various different

periods.

Then of course within Britain, you've got networks of contacts in the Late Bronze Age that

will link the South of England with the North of England and with Ireland. Actually, having

said that, this thing about the link across the North Sea - it looks very much as though in

the Late Bronze Age, there was a connection between Denmark and Ireland, whereby

Denmark was very poor in metals - it didn't have metals of its own. Ireland with which rich

in metals, particularly gold.

And what we do have is large amounts of amber going from Denmark to Ireland, probably

through Scotland, where it was then worked up and made into these incredibly beautiful

amber necklaces. And then what you find in places like Must Farm, there is a single bead

that will have come from one of these necklaces. So that's why I rode back from what I was

saying about not many links across the North Sea - actually in the Late Bronze Age, there

was this system.

CB: I think what you can say is that there was some sort of metal superhighway running up the

sea from Iberia, from just outside the Straits of Gibraltar probably, where there are massive

ore deposits at Rio Tinto; coming round Portugal past France and of course through the

English Channel, and probably going up as far as the west coast of Sweden, just north of

Gothenburg and into some of the Norwegian fjords as well. Because Scandinavia needed a

kick-start for its Bronze Age with ores from elsewhere. They didn't develop their own their

own mining up there this early. So Spanish ores, copper ores from Iberia will be a natural

bedfellow for, probably, Cornish tin to make those bronzes.

AS: And in fact, I think Stuart Needham suggested that the so-called Beaker metal included

copper from Spanish sources - I think in the north of Spain, in that case. And I've thought of

another connection between Wessex and Denmark, which is that the very rich graves around

Wessex feature a lot of amber, and they were getting it in raw form from Scandinavia. And

we can tell that partly because in Denmark, there are amber beads that are skeuomorph - so

they are copies of beads that were current in Early Bronze Age Wessex. And also there is a

faience bead at a place called Fjallerslev, which is on the northwest coast of the Jutland

Peninsula and that will have been made in Britain. So yes, as early as around 2000 BC people

were actually getting amber from Scandinavia and bringing it to the south of England, which

pretty amazing.

CB: And one thing I'd recommend if you ever go to that part of Sweden, just north of

Gothenburg, there are some amazing rock carvings there of ships. And these ships are very

recognizably Mediterranean ships, and it's not one or two - it's literally tens of them, carved

on granite boulders. So the people living in that part of Scandinavia were familiar with

seeing these ships. It's very exciting to me, that real evidence of first-hand maritime trade

coming all that way, using ships that would be recognizable in the port of Mycenae, for

example. It's just incredible, really.

AS: And I'm also wearing a fabulous replica of an Early Bronze Age amber necklace that was

found in a grave in East Anglia, Little Cressingham. And this amber is indeed from

Scandinavia, and the original one was made from amber from Scandinavia. So there you go!

SW: So, another question I wanted to ask was about, going back to the hoard itself - I

mentioned earlier about heirlooms in hordes. And, especially in the Late Bronze Age, there's

always a couple of objects which seem to be out of context and out of date; whereas most

of the objects on the whole tend to be relatively fresh and new objects, or hardly used or

broken, but they're not particularly old. And I just wondered what your thoughts were on the

inclusion of objects which are hundreds of years old, going into these into some of these

hoards?

JD: Well it’s not uncommon at all. There’s several Late Bronze Age and very early Iron Age

hoards – certainly, I think it's either the Salisbury Hoard or Waldorf Hoard that has part of a

very early Bronze Age axe in it. And certainly in the Wessex area, there are several Late

Bronze Age hoards that have almost the whole selection from flat axe, flanged axe, palstave

axe - and then you've got the more common selection of everything else.

And there are also Roman hoards that occasionally have bits of Bronze Age metal work. And

again, there's another example - I think it's in the West Berkshire Museum - they've got a

Roman founder’s hoard with a smashed up palstave in it. So whether these objects have

been curated over a period of time, or whether they're being refound - it's probably a

mixture of both.

But it's not an uncommon thing, and it ranges across different materials. In the Museum of

London display, one of the Iron Age burials has two Tranchet axes in, I think it’s an Iron Age

burial? Separated thousands and thousands of years; the Iron Age being closer to today than

the Iron Age was close to the Mesolithic. So it shows that there is both the curation of

objects for the object’s sake, but the curation of objects for the recycling metal value’s sake,

as well.

AS: And in fact, there's a fantastic book that came out recently, co-edited by Matt Knight, and I

think it's called The Past in the Past. And it's all about old things that are found in old

hoards.

SW: That’s what I was going to ask – I think that most people's introduction to the Bronze Age at

home is listening to the Greek Bronze Age. I think that's where we all come into it. I just

wondered - one of you talked about the way men travelled around and did these heroic

journeys. Do you think this is part of, coming from the Greek tradition, those oral stories

and as oral traditions traveling around? Do you think that's an important factor in this, in the

trade networks and these men traveling around all over Europe at this in this period?

AS: Well, I think the idea of making heroic journeys, I mean, it's something that was independent

of what was happening in Greece but partly because it's much, much earlier than Homeric

times. And it's a kind of recognized way to get prestige. But if you're a kind of frosting

young buck and you're able to get into a boat with your chums and go on these long

journeys, and then come back and tell people and impress them with all the amazing tales

of exotic faraway places and bringing back exotic stuff from them, then I think that's

something that we can see quite a lot of. And that's what we think the Amesbury Archer was

all about. He must have travelled a lot in his lifetime. So he started his life probably in

Switzerland or Bavaria, and then the things that were buried with him include a couple of

knives that are made of copper from either France or Iberia - so somewhere along the

Atlantic facade - and either those must have travelled, or he must have travelled around to

get them. And it was just by chance that he died in England. But there must have been

enough people with him to be able to give him a fantastically lavish burial. So I think his is

one of the richest, if not the richest Beaker grave anywhere in Beaker Europe.

SW: Do you think it's happening the other way, that people from Britain are now going into the

Continent, and that’s one reason why we might be getting some of these more exotic metal

artefacts coming back into the country?

AS: Well, I think certainly the rich people - the Early Bronze Age people that are buried around

Stonehenge - they had contact with their counterparts in Armorica in Brittany. And there

must have been toing and froing - you know, you go and visit Prince So-and-so over there,

and he would come and visit you and you'd have a good time, and you'd exchange things

and ideas and all that. And yes, I suppose, that could be portrayed as undertaking heroic

journeys, because after all, crossing the Channel was no mean feat. You'd obviously choose

your time to do it, and it's obviously easiest in the summer when it's calmer, and you're not

going to get into a boat about this time of year if you've got any sense! But yes, I think

making these journeys was part very much of the social life of the elite.

CB: Yes, and traders, bronze smiths and warriors were very much the mobile individuals, when

you think about it. So it's not unreasonable that that burials would contain evidence of some

of that travel, and indeed their bodies themselves contain the evidence as well, when

scientific archaeology can be done on the bones and so on.

SW: Do any of you guys have questions for each other that you'd want to ask, rather than me

asking all the questions?

CB: The big question for me is what happens next to the material? Because it's all now

beautifully on display - but what a wealth of treasures to do further research on!

SW: I don't have any information for you, unfortunately, about what's going to happen, but

hopefully we will! I don't know if James has anything to add about what is happening further

with it. Are you involved in anything else?

JD: I, like you, haven't heard anything. All I know is that at some point it's going to be ending up

in Havering Museum, but that's about it. I would certainly, from the very brief preview that

myself and several others had of the hoard before it was put into the temporary exhibition,

I'd be very keen to get a proper look at it. Because there was so many people coming

together that never get to talk to each other in one group - there was as much interest in

talking to each other as to looking at the objects! Eventually, it was a case of “right guys

we've kind of got to close the museum now!”, and we said “well we’ve only been a five

minutes! We've still got all the other 400-odd objects to look at!” and it was like, “no, put

down the toys back in the box!” So yes, I think there'll be opportunity to perhaps go through

the hoard again, and perhaps look at it with fresh eyes, maybe. I hope so anyway!

CB: Yes I think it's got a lot more to tell us with further analysis. Let's put it that way. But what a

strategic location overlooking the Thames, which would have been a main artery of trade!

So, it's not a surprise that the site is where it is. As James was saying, you know, trees are

relatively plentiful from the place and we don't know for sure I don't think, that they were

working metals on the site. Do we?

SW: No, there's no evidence, but about five miles away is another site in the same landscape and

that's where the sword mould comes from, on display. So within the immediate area there is

evidence of manufacture. But as you said already on the evidence is very slight, you know,

anywhere. But yes, on this site itself, I don't think there's any evidence of any

manufacturing processes.

CB: One thing we haven't touched on is that bits of metal like this, and bits of ingots and so on;

they can be stores of value in and of themselves in a in a pre-coinage era, of course. In the

Near East in this period, you get a lot of silver horns - literally what's known as hacksilver,

where you literally hack off a bit to pay for something. So it's in the pre-coinage era.

Obviously bronze is not as precious as silver, but nevertheless it would have been extremely

valuable to melt down again, as James has pointed out, really.

SW: Do you think that because obviously, so much bronze is being made and is out there by the

Late Bronze Age and is in society that the value has actually dropped? And that's why you do

see these larger hoards in the Late Bronze Age, because the value is slightly less than it

would have been, you know, hundreds or a few hundred years before?

CB: I think it was much for more available, wasn’t it Alison? I think bronze started out as a

relatively precious thing, and you made pins and jewellery and things like that out of it. And

then copper and tin became more available; more bronze was in circulation, and more

people get to use it. Ordinary people get to own a tool or two and that sort of thing. But

nevertheless, they would have recycled.

AS: Yes, but also by the time that the Havering Hoard was deposited, there was this incredible

inflationary bubble going on, whereby bronze was your unit of wealth and people would be

accumulating vast amounts of it and then they would give it to the gods in huge votive

deposits. I'm not saying that's what the Havering Hoard was about. But certainly there are a

lot of very large Late Bronze Age hoards, particularly in watery locations. And it was as

though this was a way of showing off your wealth and your power. You know, “I am so

wealthy that I'm able to afford to give the gods this this precious material.” And in fact

around 800 BC, it's almost as though that inflationary bubble burst and somebody said,

“That's enough. We're just not going to accumulate more of this stuff.” And then there were

really big social changes around 800 BC, and then that kind of opened the way for iron to

take over.

CB: Yes, I think that's a key point about that Havering Hoard – it’s right at the end of the Bronze

Age, and iron is about to appear as the main metal for tools and weapons.

JD: Yes, and there's going to be a huge amount of uncertainty around the Continent. As we've

discussed already, we know that people and ideas and information is moving incredibly

quickly. And in areas where iron working is being explored that would have been filtered

into areas with people who had large stocks of bronze, which, in markets today when you

start to get these rumours coming in and out, it starts to worry people. So you know, you're

at that point, do you get rid of your bronze? Do you make a special sacrifice, because that's

more valuable than try and hold onto the metal itself? It would have been worrying times.

And for it to be a proper Bronze Age collapse - there are those implications that we really

have today when we have serious economic collapses.

And certainly, looking at a number of these hordes when you see the amount of socketed

axes and various other objects and smashed up swords, clearly the value is not in the

objects anymore. Very few decorated post-casting, you know, they’re work hardened and

swords are carefully finished off, but that's the standard really, that's nothing special. So the

value must have moved over elsewhere. And I absolutely loved your comment earlier, Carol,

and I don't know why I haven't come across it used more but “weapons grade bronze”, it just

sounds brilliant!

CB: Yes, weapons grade bronze! I don't want to make end of the world analogies with today, but

maybe if I was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I be slightly concerned about my own

resources, because we need to decarbonize, you know; we need to use less of the stuff. So

it's actually quite a good analogy, I think, to what people were facing at the end of the

Bronze Age with a better technology coming to face them pretty fast, and arriving also from

the Continent in all likelihood.

JD: Yes, and with these people who are sat on resources, whether it be alluvial tin sources or

copper mines - I know in in the UK, Late Bronze Age copper mines are not quite what they

were in the Middle Bronze Age - but even so. And going on to my point about weapons-

grade bronze, you've got a large amount of bronze stock out there, there all sorts of crazy

alloys now because they've been mixing all sorts of different objects and recycling with bits

of lead coming in, and varying quantities of tin. So do people really have a decent grasp on

what the alloy is now? Are people starting to lose faith in the metal because people have

been given or handed over swords that are really quite rubbish, in some cases! Or these

poor metalworkers who are trying to pour out their bronze and it's really not reacting as

normal. And it’s possibly why people are desperately trying to get these whacking great

copper ingots and just to try and get some grip on what this failing alloy is.

AS: They needed to some quantitative easing, didn't they?

JD: They needed something, yes!

SW: Thank you very much, it was a really informative discussion. I learned a lot and I hope the

viewers learned something new too! I’d like to thank all our speakers tonight for their

fantastic presentations and discussion. If you enjoyed this event, we have two more talks

coming up in the New Year that you can join us for – either digitally or (hopefully) on site at

the museum. The next talk in February will explore culture and conflict in the Bronze Age,

and you can get your tickets by visiting our website. Thank you all for joining us this

evening, and we hope to see you again soon.