Ancient Europe, Metal Ages: Bronze Age (3500-500 BC, Iron Age 500 BC-AD 800)

Bronze Age (3500-500 BC)

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, the optimum proportion being about nine parts of copper to one part of tin. It has a number of advantages of pure copper: a lower melting point, it is harder, and above all it is easier to cast without flaws. Tin and copper do not normally occur naturally in proximity and this resulted in a significant rise in trade, which led to the rapid diffusion of ideas and was an important factor in the progressive differentiation of status./

In Europe the Bronze Age conventionally spans the period (2000-800 BC). Metalwork centres were established in the Aegean (Minoan/Mycenaean), central Europe (Unetice), Spain (Argaric), Britain (Wessex), Ireland and Scandinavia. During the Later Bronze Age, the great folk movements led to the spread of the Urnfield culture (c.1300-c.750 BC).

Iron Age (500 BC-AD 800)

The technique of smelting is more complicated than with copper or tin, since the first smelt gives only an unpromising slaggy lump, the bloom. Hammering at red heat expels stone fragments. Pure iron is too soft for functional use and combining carbon (0.1-1.7 % by weight) with the iron makes steel. Once the technique was discovered it replaced earlier metallurgies because iron ores are much more common than those of copper or tin and the resulting metal is far superior.

The technique of iron working was mastered c.1500 BC by the Hittites. When they were overthrown c.1100 BC and their secret leaked out, the knowledge of iron spread rapidly and it replaced bronze as tools as weapons. In Europe the transition to the Iron Age is conventionally placed at the beginning of the first millennium BC: Villanovan (c.800-c.700 BC), Hallstatt (c.800-c.450 BC), and La Tene (c.450-1st century BC).