średniowiecze: Bronze Age

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The Bronze Age is an archaeological and anthropological term defining a phase in the development of material culture among ancient societies in Asia, the Near East and Europe. An ancient civilisation or culture is deemed part of the Bronze Age if it either produced bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying it with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or traded other items for bronze from producing areas elsewhere. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of the three-age system, following the Stone Age and preceding the Iron Age. Conceived as a global era, the Bronze Age follows the Neolithic ("New Stone") period, with a transition period between the two known as the Chalcolithic ("copp…

Evidence: 36 • authority: 72

The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age system of technology after the Copper Age and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated for describing Iron Age Europe and the ancient Near East. In the archaeology of the Americas, a five-period system is conventionally used instead; indigenous cultures there did not develop an iron economy in the pre-Columbian era, though some did work copper and…

Evidence: 26 • authority: 88

Bronze Fish. Abstract The Bronze Age was a time of pivotal economic change when new long-distance trading networks became associated with a macro-regional division of labour and decentralised political complexity. These developments occurred against the background of a shifting mosaic of subsistence patterns, which included the east-west exchange of crops across Eurasia and (in some areas) greater use of secondary products. As Bronze Age economies became more specialised and diverse, it might be assumed that there was also an increased emphasis on the procurement and trade of fish and other marine resources. However, archaeological analyses of such resources are limited in contrast to land-…

Evidence: 26 • authority: 72

The European Bronze Age is characterized by bronze artifacts and the use of bronze implements. The regional Bronze Age succeeds the Neolithic and Copper Age and is followed by the Iron Age. It starts with the Aegean Bronze Age c. 3200 BC and the Maykop culture in the North Caucasus c. 3500 BC, and spans the entire 3rd and 2nd millennia BC (including the Únětice culture, Ottomány culture, British Bronze Age, Argaric culture, Nordic Bronze Age, Tumulus culture, Nuragic culture, Terramare culture, Urnfield culture and Lusatian culture), lasting until c. 800 BC in central Europe. Arsenical bronze was produced from the 4th millennium BC (prior to the introduction of tin bronze), and continued as…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 88

Precious Stones and Bronzes in Jade Age and Bronze Age of China. Abstract This article aims to revisit the terms ‘Jade Age’ and ‘Bronze Age’ in respect to Chinese archaeology and history. It argues that the active exchanges of techniques, ideas, and tools between the bronze and stone producers have blurred the definitions of these periods and proposes that we focus more on the concrete agents in history. This article adopts evidence from the cold mechanical treatments of precious stones and bronzes. It presents and analyzes traces of polishing and chiseling on bronze surfaces and argues that some of the traces may have been left by abrasives as practiced in the lithic industry. This demonst…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 88

The Bronze Age and Southeast Asia. Abstract As the scholarly border between China and Southeast Asia has dissipated, so the vast region from the Yangtze River to Malaysia has been integrated into a whole. There was an inexorable expansion of copper-base expertise southward, reaching Lingnan and Yunnan by 1400-1200 bc , and Southeast Asia one or two centuries later, with ultimate origins in the Asian steppes via the Chinese Central Plains and Sichuan. As prospectors identified and exploited the Southeast Asian copper mines, a limited range of copper-base artefacts moved along established exchange routes, including socketed axes, bangles and spears. At first rare and used to advertise status…

Evidence: 21 • authority: 88

Mesopotamia’s Bronze Age as a Cosmopolitan Age. Abstract The key term of this volume is bronze: in its basic meaning it is an alloy of two metals, copper and tin, even if there are other combinations, such as arsenical bronze. In Mesopotamia, the area I will discuss here, every form of bronze shared a common characteristic, however. To make bronze it was necessary to bring together two metals with origins in separate and distant places. The sources changed over time, but in Mesopotamia itself bronze was never the product of elements found in the same location. The outcome was something special, a compound stronger and deemed to be more appealing than its separate components. My discussion h…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Viking Age (about 800–1050 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. Although few of the Scandinavians of the Viking Age were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy, they are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen. Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, a…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The three-age system is the division of human prehistory (with some overlap into the historical periods in a few regions) into three time-periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, although the concept may also refer to other tripartite divisions of historic time periods. In some systems, a fourth Copper Age is added as between the Stone Age and Bronze Age. The Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages are also known collectively as the Metal Ages. In history, archaeology and physical anthropology, the three-age system is a methodological concept adopted during the 19th century according to which artefacts and events of late prehistory and early history could be broadly ordered into a reco…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Dietary inequality marker reveals 10,000 years of gender and cultural disparity in Europe.. Diet is a key to evaluating social and health inequalities over time, as it reflects disparities in access to resources often linked to socioeconomic and gender factors. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes, while semi-quantitative, typically limit intersite comparisons, as the results are tied to local baseline isotope values. In this study, we overcome this limitation by applying the interdecile ratio-a metric from economics-to isotope data from 12,281 individuals across 393 European sites over millennia. Our isotope-based dietary inequality index reveals the nonlinear evolution of dietary dispariti…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Comparative regional stable isotope analysis reveals fluctuations in millet consumption during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Eastern Adriatic.. This study presents the largest regional-scale stable isotope investigation of human and faunal remains spanning the Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 2400-100 BCE) in the Eastern Adriatic to date. New δ 13 C and δ 15 N data from 51 individuals were integrated with previously published results (n = 233) to explore long-term and region-specific dietary trends, with a focus on the emergence of millet as a dietary component. Results reveal an inland-coastal contrast: while coastal populations predominantly consumed C 3 -based diets, inland groups show consist…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Resolution of the High versus Low debate for Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt.. The unrivaled millennia-long historical chronology of ancient Egypt forms the backbone for archaeological synchronization across the entire Eastern Mediterranean region c. 3000-1000 BCE. However, for more than a century, scholars have wrangled over the correct calendrical positioning of this record, with older scenarios being referred to as 'High', and younger ones, 'Low' chronologies. Offsets between the two can be as great as a century, substantially confusing connections with other civilizations of the time. Here, we settle this debate for two major periods of political unity in ancient Egypt, the Old Kingdom (th…