Few will doubt that in the East Mediterranean world and in the Near East the development of metallurgy was an important factor (though certainly not the only one) in the evolution of socio-economic organization in the Late Chalcolithic and especially in the Early and Late Bronze Age. The availability of silver, lead and gold added markedly to the possibilities of the acquisition of prestigious objects by the few, to developments in the concept of wealth and in the development of hierarchical societies. The availability of copper, arsenical copper, and later, tin bronze made possible the production of tools which transformed certain crafts (perhaps particularly carpentry and shipbuilding) and, with the development of weapons, revolutionized warfare.This no doubt led to something of an arms race which put its own pressures on societies in the search for and exploitation of metals. The more successful population groups will have greatly increased the density of their population and changed their structure, not only by moving from local chief to regional monarch but also by that monarch securing his authority by the creation of dependent privileged groups and by the encouragement of the emergence of specialized workers and craftsmen. In turn such socio-economic developments, in which the emergence of class differentiation led to the creation of aristocracies or other forms of elite ruling classes, eventually provided the environments in which skilled metal workers could find the time, necessary incentives and artistic inspiration to develop advanced metalworking skills.
New chemical analyses of E B I1 copper-alloy artefacts fromTroy show that about seventy per cent are of high tin, low arsenic, bronze; the remaining Trojan objects are of arsenical copper but contain n o more than 3 per cent of arsenic. Lead-isotope analyses suggest that at this time the Trojans made use of at least five different copper-ore deposits and that at least two of these were not in the immediate vicinity of Troy itself.A t this period tin bronze was unknown in the Early Helladic, Cycladic or Minoan cultures. Low-arsenic tin bronzes do however constitute sixty-nine per cent of the copper-alloy artefacts excavated at the fortified hilltop EC IllA settlement at Kastri on Syros, but lead-isotope analyses show that the copper in these objects is derived from three different ore deposits which are different from those exploited by the early Cycladic peoples on Amorgos, Paros, Kythnos and Chalandriani on Syros. For Kastri the alloy types are closely similar to and the copper ore sources used are identical with those employed in Troy 11; in addition there are good Anatolian parallels for some of the metal types occurring at Kastri. Taken together with evidence from the pottery, the architecture and the nature of the site it seems inescapable that Kastri was a short-lived settlement of Anatolians who lived, perhaps, in somewhat uneasy juxtaposition with their Cycladic neighbours. These Anatolians came most probably from Troy or the Troad since tin bronze was virtually unknown at this period elsewhere in Anatolia, and certainly not in Cilicia, except at the central Anatolian sites of Ahlatlibel, Alishar and Alaca Huyiik.
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