Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Ancient Artifacts from the Bronze Age
Articles on ancient bronze weapons
Atacamite or Malachite? A Collector’s Field Protocol for Active Corrosion By Andrzej M. Izyk — Sancta Clara Collection / AncientBronzes.com There is a companion article on this site, The Language of Patina, which is about reading a surface: what the…
Three heavy copper axe-adzes from the Sancta Clara Collection — and what they reveal about native copper, arsenic, the memory of stone, and the one design flaw that would take two thousand years to solve. Three axes sit together on…
The Flanged Hilt: How Bronze Age Smiths Solved the Sword’s Weakest Point — from the Zagros to the Baltic: How Bronze Age smiths from the Zagros to the Baltic independently solved the sword’s weakest point — the blade-to-hilt junction —…
Unifying R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Western Asiatic Shaft-Hole Axes, Iraq 11 (1949), 90–129/130, pls. XXXIII–XXXIX, and J. Deshayes, Les outils de bronze, de l’Indus au Danube (IVe au IIe millénaire), BAH LXXI, 2 vols. (Paris, 1960). 0. Read this first: the status…
There is a suit of armour in the Archaeological Museum of Nafplion that has ruined a great many films for me. It was pulled out of a chamber tomb at Dendra in the Argolid in 1960: fifteen sheets of beaten…
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 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…
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…