Download What Is The Bronze Age?

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>.