# Bronze Age Preceded Iron Age? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 8, 2016, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093 "2016-11-08T19:15:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/41 "2016-11-10T14:33:06Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Does that mean that the Mayans and Aztecs were Stone Age cultures? If they worked silver and gold in copious quantities, I assume they also worked copper? ---
**Author:** ![levdrakon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@levdrakon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/levdrakon)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/42 "2016-11-10T14:39:50Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Does that mean that the Mayans and Aztecs were Stone Age cultures? They’re considered stone age, yes. There was a culture in SA that developed into bronze, and much later they think it developed again in west Mexico, possibly via maritime contact with SA, but the two cultures you mention were pretty much stone age. Various cultures around the Americas worked with copper and gold to make decorative items, used as status symbols, but didn’t develop smelting. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/43 "2016-11-10T16:23:23Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > If they worked silver and gold in copious quantities, I assume they also worked copper? I don’t know if they had access to native copper. Although eventually copper smelting did develop in South American and spread to Mesoamerica. This article says the Aztecs did not adopt metalworking. T didn’t mention Mayans. > **[Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America)** > > Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America is the extraction, purification and alloying of metals and metal crafting by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century. Indigenous Americans had been using native metals from ancient times, with recent finds of gold artifacts in the Andean region dated to 2155–1936 BC, > and North American copper finds being dated to approximately 5000 BC. > The metal would have been found in nature without the need for smelting, an In ... ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/44 "2016-11-10T16:23:26Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Wrong. > > A bronze sword bends more easily…but then you can bend it right back. But iron doesn’t bend, it breaks. It’s much more brittle than bronze. And bronze can be much more easily worked and recycled than iron. > > The reason iron supplanted bronze is not that iron makes better weapons, it’s that iron is orders of magnitude more common. If you have the technology and energy to convert common iron ore to iron you can crank out tons of iron tools. For bronze you have to find rare copper ores or copper nuggets, plus even more rare tin. > > And so bronze weapons were extremely expensive relative to iron weapons. That’s why in the Iliad all the Acheans and Trojans are obsessed with stripping the weapons and armor from their dead foes. A bronze breastplate was a fortune in bronze. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qLhq5V2-o) is a YouTube video that discusses the pros and cons of bronze verse iron wrt swords that’s pretty good. The TL&DW version is you have most of it right…bronze makes perfectly fine weapons, and the disadvantages of bending or being soft (compared to modern steel anyway) applied to both bronze and iron weapons during their respective ages. There were some iron age peoples who were able to master iron weapons better than others, and a well made and crafted iron sword had some advantages over bronze, but the real differentiation was availability, as you said…bronze (or copper and tin) weren’t as available as iron, even though iron took more resources to actually produce. Obvious when we get to steel it’s a new ballgame, as you could make a steel sword longer and more flexible than either bronze or iron, and also you had more options (given more technology and craft) for the edge. I think a lot of folks under rate bronze, but it was a very good material for it’s time for crafting weapons and armor. A lot of modern bronze that’s used for decorative items are softer, but you could change the hardness of the bronze by varying the mix of the alloy, and IIRC the Chinese could do some really interesting things with alloys of bronze and their weapons. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/45 "2016-11-10T17:56:02Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > “Smelting Iron the Viking way is a remarkable simple process. It only takes some charcoal, some bog iron ore, roasted and crushed, plus a simple clay oven.” [Bog Iron](http://www.google.com.au/search?q=bog+iron+smelting&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&gfe_rd=cr&ei=XWgiWObmC6nr8AfikoLACA) When I was at the University of Minnesota there was a grad student who built a giant clay oven to smelt iron. He got Kingsford to donate the charcoal. The smelter was able to produce iron, it just wasn’t the best quality. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/46 "2016-11-10T18:18:06Z")
> [@Si\_Amigo](#): > > Obviously they knew how to work silver and gold so they were not stone age. Not up on the technology of their weaponry and that kind of irks me as a hole in my knowledge. I’ll make a point to look it up, but please someone elaborate. They used little in the way of metal tools or weapons, so yes, stone age. They did use copper (and gold and silver, of course) for decoration, and a little bit of bronze. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/47 "2016-11-10T20:43:09Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Let’s be clear here: using meteoric iron doesn’t mean being in an Iron Age. Even limited smelting of iron doesn’t mean that. An Iron Age is when that’s the go-to metal for your blades and tools - iron must be the dominant material over bronze, copper or stone, even while you still use those earlier materials. The Dorset and Thule people certainly used iron, but they were never in an Iron Age. Incorrrect, or at least highly debatable. Indigenous use of iron in the Arctic did not comprise of a few ornamental trinkets, but an important technological advancement, eagerly adopted and widespread. Here in Fennoscandia, early use of iron - very few iron artefacts total - signals the beginning of the Iron Age, as it should. Even small amounts of iron is a game changer. A stone scraper dulls in 20 minutes of scraping skins, is resharpened once and then unusable, so gets replaced by another, ad infinitum, and all of them survive in the soil almost indefinetely. An iron scraper sees thousands of hours of use, and once worn down to a stub is used for some other purpose. When even that use is exhausted and the tool is discarded, it readily oxidizes on or in the ground, and most are gone within a couple of millennia. Concrete evidence of iron use therefore never matches the ancient realities. Myriad ethnographic accounts depict the ferver bits of metal created among (former) Stone Age people. Stone blades cast into the river to make room for metal, shirt sold off one’s back for a small knife etc. ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/48 "2016-11-10T22:21:57Z")
> [@White SIFL](#): > > How is that less work than just hauling the cannons me over? Five tons of bronze is easier to haul in many different carts than as one single piece. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/49 "2016-11-10T22:25:43Z")
> [@Hypno-Toad](#): > > Five tons of bronze is easier to haul in many different carts than as one single piece. So, where is your cite? ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/50 "2016-11-10T22:33:32Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > So, where is your cite? _The Renaissance at War_ by Thomas Arnold 2001 Or do you need a cite that a heavy load is easier to transport when broken up? ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/51 "2016-11-10T23:15:07Z")
> [@Hypno-Toad](#): > > _The Renaissance at War_ by Thomas Arnold 2001 > > Or do you need a cite that a heavy load is easier to transport when broken up? Well, thats a whole book. maybe a online cite we can check? No, but then smelting bronze into a cannon requires you have a smelter and a mold. Here’s one where they hauled on of the largest cannons ever, rather than break it up and recast. [The Guns of Constantinople](http://www.historynet.com/the-guns-of-constantinople.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/52 "2016-11-10T23:29:11Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Well, thats a whole book. maybe a online cite we can check? > > No, but then smelting bronze into a cannon requires you have a smelter and a mold. > > Here’s one where they hauled on of the largest cannons ever, rather than break it up and recast. [The Guns of Constantinople](http://www.historynet.com/the-guns-of-constantinople.htm) The knowledge came from the book. So there it is. ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/53 "2016-11-10T23:37:13Z")
Found the reference. The book qualifies the practice of breaking up pieces for later recasting by adding, “for when an army needed to beat a quick retreat.” So maybe not normal siege practice. But not unheard of. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/54 "2016-11-10T23:40:08Z")
> [@Hypno-Toad](#): > > Found the reference. The book qualifies the practice of breaking up pieces for later recasting by adding, “for when an army needed to beat a quick retreat.” So maybe not normal siege practice. But not unheard of. Well, OK, I can buy that. And if you get overtaken, they dont get cannons just hunks of bronze. ---
**Author:** ![Hypno-Toad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@Hypno-Toad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hypno-Toad)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/55 "2016-11-10T23:41:59Z")
[Here’s a link](http://www.alderneywreck.com/index.php/artefacts/guns-and-shot/bronze-to-iron) about the switch from bronze to iron for cannons in Elizabethan England. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2016, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/56 "2016-11-10T23:56:09Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > No, but then smelting bronze into a cannon requires you have a smelter and a mold. They were melting, not smelting. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/57 "2016-11-11T07:56:45Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Does that mean that the Mayans and Aztecs were Stone Age cultures? Yes. And now you understand why the 3 Ages system is crap. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/58 "2016-11-11T09:14:09Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > Incorrrect, or at least highly debatable. Indigenous use of iron in the Arctic did not comprise of a few ornamental trinkets I didn’t say they did. > [@](#): > > , but an important technological advancement, eagerly adopted and widespread. No argument here. > [@](#): > > Here in Fennoscandia, early use of iron - very few iron artefacts total - signals the beginning of the Iron Age, as it should. Nope. Some (imported) iron artefacts pop up in the Nordic Bronze Age already, doesn’t signal the change to Iron Age. That only starts in ~500 BCE once local production kicks in, diffusing from Denmark (via contacts with Hallstatt Culture), into the Peninsula. And a lack of iron artefacts is only remarkable if there’s a wealth of other artefacts - but that period is called the _Findless Age_ for a reason. . > [@](#): > > Even small amounts of iron is a game changer. Totally agree. The issue here isn’t with whether use of iron happens, or matters. The issue is with what constitutes “dominant” usage. > [@](#): > > Concrete evidence of iron use therefore never matches the ancient realities. You say this like we can’t distinguish between stone and metal tooling marks and are only dependent on actual tool finds… ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/59 "2016-11-11T13:58:52Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Yes. And now you understand why the 3 Ages system is crap. It’s a fine way to sort artifacts for a Danish cabinet of curiosities. But those three ages are irrelevant in the Americas. In Mesoamerica, it’s Pre-Classic, Classic & Post-Classic. (With subdivisions.) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Stafford\_Cripps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_stafford_cripps/32/7167_2.png) [@The\_Stafford\_Cripps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Stafford_Cripps)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2016, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093/60 "2016-11-11T18:30:12Z")
At last there’s a discussion about something I have personally researched! This is just a drive by to mention that one writer comments that “Thule culture could, with little exaggeration, be called an “iron age” culture.” He was referring to the fact that the Inuit of Western Greenland had access to iron, not only from the Cape York Meteorite, but also A) a source of raw iron found in pea size lumps in basalt at Disko Island, 800km to the south, and B) smelted iron that could be obtained from Norse settlements yet further south. (McGhee, R. 1984 ‘Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A Review of the Evidence’, American Antiquity 49, 4-26.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bronze-age-preceded-iron-age/771093.md?page=4)