What Did Bronze Age People Do With All That Bronze?

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What Did Bronze Age People Do With All That Bronze?

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&

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/The Conversation

We have no written evidence about how people lived in Europe during the Bronze Age (2300–800 BC), so archaeologists piece together their world from the artifacts and materials they left behind. Unlike perishable materials such as wool or wood, 

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Considerable archaeological attention focuses on elite members of society, largely because common people left fewer traces. A 

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 suggests we can learn something about these everyday people from ******* hoards of metal – and that their economic lives were much like our own.

Why Did People Bury Hoards of Metal?

During the Bronze Age, it was a common practice across Europe to 

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 in the ground. People would gather metal objects and then bury them together or 

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, such as a bog or a boundary.

Sometimes these hoards included 

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, sometimes just a few. Sometimes they were composed of a single type of object – hoards of tens of axes of the same form are a well-known example. Sometimes they included a variety of objects, and even fragments of broken objects.

Despite their variety, the hoards show 

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 across Europe, and that bronze objects had a special value throughout most of it.

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The Havering Hoard of Bronze age weapons and tools found in London.  (

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Why did people ******** these hoards? Archaeologists have spent decades trying 

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Was it a religious act? An intentional destruction of valued goods designed to lessen wealth inequalities? Scrap hidden during times of strife or put aside for 

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?

Only a small number of Bronze Age people have ever been found. Often these were people ******* in huge mounds of earth, who are presumed to have been important figures – ritual leaders, chiefs or other elites. Archaeologists have tended to assume that these people and 

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 in the Bronze Age.

Bronze as Money for Common Folk?

In 

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 in Nature Human Behaviour, archaeologists Nicola Ialongo and Giancarlo Lago propose a different way of understanding hoards. Instead of focusing on elites as the movers and shakers, they suggest hoards show how common people contributed to the interconnected Bronze Age world and the spread of metal objects within it.

Ialongo and Lago analyzed nearly 25,000 objects from hoards in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Germany dating from the full 1,500-year span of the Bronze Age. They found that, over the centuries, a standardized weight system emerged that was widely shared across the Bronze Age world.

The paper goes on to argue this standardization indicates that small pieces of bronze of standard weights could have been used as currency for everyday transactions by ordinary people.

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Dutch scientists believe that these axe heads and jewelry objects may have been used as Bronze Age money. (M.H.G. Kuijpers / 

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The Spread of ********* Standards

Well before 2300 BC, there seems to have been 

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 in artifact forms, at least on a surface level. Distinct types of objects emerged, such as daggers or certain pottery vessels, which appear similar 

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 but had different local uses in different places.

Archaeologists believe this sort of standardization arose from a mix of shared 

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 and 

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. When encountering new people whose language you don’t speak, having a shared way of dressing or acting can be a sort of social lubrication, easing communication and the exchange of stories and goods.

During the Bronze Age, this manifested in widely recognized social personae, or roles in society. The best known of these is “

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” with his 

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, which was common to much of the continent.

But does it follow that this interest in standardized forms – and later weights – means we see the development of a nascent currency system? And if so, does this mean we should assume that Bronze Age peoples’ economic behavior was the same as our own?

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Part of the Dowris Hoard of 200 pieces of Bronze found in 1833. (Trustees of the British Museum/

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What is Money, Anyway?

There are many views about what money is and what it does for different societies, 

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Many modern economists focus on money’s usefulness in transactions as a medium of exchange. This emphasizes market-based buying and selling.

Other economists apply “chartalist” theory (taken from the ****** word for “token”) to emphasize 

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. In this view, money can be used for “

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”, to keep track of socially important activities such as gifts, debts, tributes and offerings. This is not just a historical idea, as even some modern debts function through 

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The distinction between these two views of money may seem like splitting hairs, but it points to 

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Beyond the Market

How would we know which view of money is more correct? To understand the function of money in a society, archaeologists and anthropologists would suggest starting with the social and technological meaning of the 

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. That is, the bits of bronze ******* in those ancient hoards.

Ialongo and Lago argue that discovering standardized counting units reveals a system of exchange, and therefore markets. But that raises a ******* question: 

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 for those bits of metal?

We know things other than metal were circulating long distances, and exchange systems were likely complex. Archaeologists believe 

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 were key Bronze Age valuables and drivers of long-distance communication, though they are ******* to find archaeologically.

Standardization also has many uses beyond social cohesion and economics. For example, Bronze Age smiths needed careful control of 

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 (copper, tin, antimony, lead and others) to make different kinds of bronze for use in their 

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. We don’t know exactly how they achieved this control, but 

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 from the same time ******* tell us Sumerian smiths did it by weight.

Ialongo and Lago show how metal hoards may teach us about the everyday livelihoods of Bronze Age communities, not just the elites. But if we overemphasize the role of exchange in their economic worlds, we risk turning them from puppets of elites to thralls of the invisible hand.

Understanding money as a form of social accounting, and standardization as a technology, can reveal much more about their lives.

Top image: Late Bronze Age hoard found in Carmarthenshire, Wales.  Source:

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, 

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What did Bronze Age people do with all that bronze? New research revives old arguments about the nature of money’ by

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&

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on

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, and has been republished under a Creative Commons License.

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#Bronze #Age #People #Bronze

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