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What Is The Bronze Age? During the stage in human history called the Bronze Age, people first began to use bronze to make tools, weapons, armor, and other implements. This level of development followed the Stone Age, when people made tools primarily of stone. Metal tools represented a significant advance. Unlike stone tools, they were shock resistant, chip proof, and could be bent or deformed without breaking. What is more, bronze can be fashioned into a great variety of shapes, including small, thin, and intricate forms, by melting and then casting—pouring it into molds to set. The Bronze Age ended with the dawn of the Iron Age, in which people made tools primarily of iron, a metal that is more flexible and much tougher than bronze. These three stages—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age—were not specific time periods, as people in different places reached these stages at different points. The Bronze Age began in Greece before 3000 BC. Bronze Age cultures later developed in Mesopotamia (in what is now Iraq), Egypt, China, the Indus River valley (in what are now Pakistan and India), and other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and Europe, including Britain by about 1900 BC. People in other areas, including most parts of the Americas and Oceania, went through a Stone Age but not a Bronze Age. Explorers and colonizers from other cultures introduced Iron Age technologies there before the use of bronze had developed. Bronze is an alloy, or mixture, of copper and tin. Before it was discovered, early metal tools were made from pure copper or sometimes from rare iron meteorites. Copper is known to have been worked in Anatolia (now in Turkey) by 6500 BC, and its use later became widespread in many areas. The metal was hammered into sheets and then cut and worked into shape. People later began casting copper. Eventually, metalworkers discovered how to extract metals from ores (metal-containing rocks) in a process called smelting. Among the first metals to be smelted were copper and tin, the components of bronze. People discovered that melting copper and tin together produced a metal that was superior to copper for use in tools and weapons. Bronze is harder and tougher than copper and can be melted at lower temperatures, making it easier to cast. For a long time, however, the metal was rare, and bronze tools were expensive specialty items, mainly What Is The Bronze Age? luxuries for the wealthy and powerful and weapons for their armies. Bronze tools did not come into wide use until about the 2nd millennium BC. During that period large deposits of tin, such as those at Cornwall, England, were mined, and an extensive trade in the metal grew. Among the great many objects made of bronze were artwork; jewelry; items for warfare including swords, daggers, spearheads, helmets, and shields; and tools and goods for agriculture, hunting, building, crafts, and ritual and household use, including axes, chisels, hammers, knives, saws, fishhooks, adzes, awls, pins, nails, and cooking vessels. Iron began to supplant bronze for use in tools in about 1200 to 1000 BC in parts of Europe and Asia. Bronze continued to be an important material for sculpture, however, because it could be easily cast. "Bronze Age" Compton's by Britannica. Britannica Online for Kids. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2016. <http://kids.britannica.com/ebi/article-9442992>.