John Lloyd John Mitchinson - The Second Book of General Ignorance (the discreetly plumper edition) by Lloyd John & Mitchinson John

Author:Lloyd, John & Mitchinson, John [Lloyd, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571273751
Publisher: Faber Faber
Published: 2010-10-06T23:00:00+00:00

What were Bronze Age tools made of?

Stone, mostly.

The Bronze Age, which in Europe is dated at 2300–600 BC, began when mankind first discovered how to make and use bronze, but this would have been a gradual industrial revolution. For much of the period, old technology (using stone and bone) would have been more widespread than metal. Bronze would have been rare and expensive, so most everyday tools and weapons would still have been made from flint and other familiar materials.

And, just as stone flourished in the Bronze Age, so bronze-working didn’t reach its peak until well into the Iron Age (1200 BC–AD 400).

We still use all three materials today. In the twenty-first century, alongside plastic bags and silicon chips, we still continue to produce iron railings, bronze bearings and statues, gravestones and grinding stones. The last people in Britain to make a living working with flint were the flintknappers who supplied the gunflints for firearms. It was a profession that only died out in the nineteenth century, when the percussion cap replaced the flintlock.

The ‘Three-Age System’ – in which the Bronze Age follows the Stone Age, and is succeeded by the Iron Age – stems from the early nineteenth century. It was the brainchild of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865), a Danish museum curator, who was looking for a nice neat way of arranging his exhibits. It was never intended to be more than a fairly crude means of placing artefacts in a chronological relationship with each other, by classifying them according to the relative sophistication of their manufacture.

Many archaeologists believe that the Stone Age – which is itself split into three eras (the Old, Middle and New Stone ages) – was probably more of a Wood Age, but that wood’s predominant role in pre-history has been hidden by the fact that wooden artefacts rot, while stone ones don’t.

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