Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Bronze Age warfare on the river the Slavs would later call Dołęża When a volunteer archaeologist named Ronald Borgwardt found a human upper-arm bone with a flint arrowhead still driven into it, eroding out of a riverbank in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in…
The Horned Warriors of Two Seas: The Nuragic Bronzetti and the Veksø Horned Helmet Connection Everyone knows the Vikings wore horned helmets. Everyone is wrong. No horned helmet has ever been found in a Viking grave; the image was invented…
The Black Gold of the Alchemists: Corinthian Bronze, Hepatizon, and the Art of Intentional Patina There is a particular romance to a lost recipe. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, confessed that the formula for the most…
The Clasp of Civilisation: A Field Guide to Ancient Fibulae and Garment Hooks For the better part of three thousand years, the peoples of Europe and the Near East did not wear clothing in the sense we understand today. They…
The Sworn Blade: The Sky Father and the Weapons of the Oath There is a particular kind of object in this collection that I have never been able to file away as merely a weapon. A sword such as Lot…
The Steppe Archers: Scythian Bronze Arrowheads and the Technology of Mounted Warfare There is a particular kind of object in this collection that I find myself returning to far more often than its modest size would seem to justify. It…
We have to begin by unlearning a word. When we look at a small ancient bronze of a woman, a bird, an ibex, or a seated god, the modern eye reaches instinctively for the category “art” — a thing made…
9 parts copper 1 part tin Bronze has a secret, and the secret is tin. Copper is everywhere — it outcrops on five continents, and almost every early complex society had a usable source within reach. But bronze, the alloy…
Zagros Mountains of doubt There is a problem with Luristan bronzes that the field has spent the better part of a century politely not staring at directly. It is this: an enormous, technically dazzling, and bewilderingly varied body of ancient…
Reading the Hand of the Smith When I lift a Bronze Age spearhead from its tray and turn it under raking light, I am not simply admiring an object — I am reading a manuscript. Every facet, faint seam, each…