New Study Shows Surprising Link Between Britain and Bronze Age Settlements

A new study has revealed the surprising role British innovation played in spurring Bronze Age civilizations across Europe, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity.

By analyzing tin ores and other tin artifacts found across Europe and at the site of four separate shipwrecks, scientists identified beyond doubt that the tin originated in England. “This means that tin mined by small farming communities in Cornwall and Devon around 3,300 years ago was being traded to ancient kingdoms and states in the East Mediterranean over 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) away,” explained one of the study’s lead authors, Benjamin Roberts. “This is the first commodity to be exported across the entire continent in British history.”

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The discovery puts to rest more than two centuries of speculation from scientists, who long endeavored to figure out how the tin used in Bronze Age communities found its way into Eurasia. Although it was known for a long time that the most accessible tin deposits were located in Devon and Cornwall, scientists had no conclusive evidence to tie those locations to Mediterranean communities.

“There has never been a major research project until now that has scientifically analyzed the tin ores and tin artifacts in south-west Britain as well as the tin deposits in Western and Central Europe,” Williams said.

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Scientists were able to make a conclusive geographical match after finding that tin found in one of the shipwrecks, which occurred off the coast of France, dated back to 600 B.C. That tin was then traced back to Cornwall, indicating a trade route which was active for hundreds of years. The results of this new study offer the first conclusive proof that Bronze Age Britain was a crucial supplier of goods and materials to neighboring nations.

“The identification of this trade network, which is likely to have involved tons of tin being moved annually across the continent, radically transforms our understanding of Britain’s social and economic relationships with the far larger and more complex societies in the distant past,” Roberts noted. “The volume, consistency and frequency of the estimated scale in the tin trade is far larger than has been imagined and requires an entirely new perspective on what Bronze Age miners and merchants were able to achieve.”