ABSTRACT
But well before this, as we have previously seen, commerce in metals had begun to ply along die Western sea-route, and Aegean-Anatolian trade had for a large part of the third millennium made known copper in Danubian Europe, where native copper-working was now being extended westward and north-westward from Hungary, and connexions were in the making with the corresponding metallurgy of Mediterranean and Adantic lands. Inevitably there will have followed an extended search for European tin. And inevitably, as earlier
in the Near East, its first discovery should be looked for in combination with copper that will have attracted attention in any case. Now, tin occurs with copper in North-Western Spain, and in due course, as we shall see below, Iberian metallurgists discovered it, just as it was discovered in fairly close proximity to copper in Brittany, and, greatly outweighing the neighbouring copper-supplies, in the famous tin-streams of Cornwall. There is also evidence for an independent dis covery of the tin of Etruria, within the Chalcolithic culture-area of Remedello in Italy, which will have supplied the smiths of the Bronze Age that supervened there, and even possibly, as Sir Arthur Evans has urged, have been drawn on by Minoan Crete. But nowhere in these regions is there proof of priority over inland Europe. There the copper now long familiar in our narrative could be obtained on both sides of the Lower Danube between the Morava and the Wallachian plain, along the Maros in company with the gold of Transylvania, and beyond both in North Hungary east of the Theiss and above all west into the Slovakian Mountains; we have seen the evidence for the first opening-up of the rich deposits of the Eastern Alps, and observed the contemporary presence of copper objects in Bohemia on the edge of the metalliferous mountains that stretch westward into Middle Germany. But, since there is no evidence of ancient knowledge of the local tin on the edge of the South Hungarian Banat, the BohemianMiddle German region is the only one of all these where the first tin of the Mid-European Bronze Age can be sought. For there and there alone the metal is to be had in quantity, from the Bohemian Erzgebirge west to the Thuringian Hills round the upper waters of the Saale. And in the centre of that belt, in the Oelsnitz district of the Vogtland, the copper ores in which it is also rich have the tin-stone occurring with them in natural combination. The superiority over pure copper of a metal containing up to 3 per cent, of tin would in any case attract notice, and since the brown spots of the tin-stone are easily detectable in the ore, the recognition of the independent presence of tin was bound to follow. There upon could ensue the establishment of standard bronze. Thus localized by the facts of m in eral geography, the event can be
fairly closely dated in archaeological terms, and thereby we shall obtain the first fixed point, outside the Aegean area, in a chronology for our European Bronze Age.
