Weapons & Artefacts

Click on the picture below and take a look at Flag Fen.

Artist Impression of a Bronze Age Site.

I have always had a fascination for the way Bronze Age and Iron Age Man lived. For thousands of years man used stone as a tool and weapon. Stone was used very crudely to start with and over many years Stone Age Man got a bit more sophisticated in how he worked his piece of stone or flint. Flint was being used for ‘cutting tools’ and making arrow heads. This sophistication in good stone work carried over to the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age and continued on and on to the present day. We still use stone in various shapes and forms from ear-rings to grave stones and it’s every where you look in our present climate. It’s the transition from working stone to working metal that really gets my interest. How did it come about this mystery of how man found a way to make metal. What possesses someone to melt something that can only be described as a piece of rock and find that it releases a crude form of metal? I can only presume that Smelting came about by accident at first. It’s not an easy task, trying to melt metal, as you need a fair amount of heat to get it to melt and why would they want to do this sort of thing in the first place. How did they realise that they needed lots of heat to melt rock.

 Iron Age House at Flag Fen

Click HERE to see the 'Great Orme Mine' web site.

Bronze Age House at Flag Fen

Once man got to know how to make metal, copper at first, he then worked this copper into very fine pieces, comprising of tools, weapons and jewellery. Fine detail found its way into these useful pieces of metal work that is still admired today. We find it a lot easier to do fine detail in anything we make these days, but think about how much time and effort went into working with metal in the Bronze and Iron Age. The smelters must have been looked upon to be like some sort of god. They would have been very special people and were probably worshiped.  

Goddess's and Bracelets

Finding out how to make copper was one good thing that happened back then, but they also found out how to make tin and then put the two together to make Bronze. Copper and tin are relatively soft metals, but smelt the two together and you get a lot harder metal called Bronze. This Bronze Age period stayed around for a couple of thousand years or so. Well it sort of started in Britain around 2500BC and went on to this present day. We still use Bronze in many things, including Statues, as they did in the Bronze Age. 

The original bronze statue of ROCKY was created by Colorado artist A. Thomas Schomberg
for Sylvester Stallone. Stallone used the statue in his film Rocky III and it originally stood in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the top of the steps. The statue was later moved to the sports complex in South Philadelphia and stood in front of the First Union Spectrum. In 2006 Stallone made his sixth ROCKY movie and the statue was moved again to a permanent location in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it can be seen today. The statue is known as ROCKY #1.

Following the introduction of pottery two millennia previously, the appearance of metalworking was another important technological step in the control of heat and the production of ever-higher temperatures using small furnaces and hide bellows. The earliest British metalwork was made of pure copper, bronze (an alloy of about 90% copper, 10% tin) or gold. Gold was used for ornaments and jewellery, bronze and copper for spearheads, axes, knives and daggers. 

Spearheads and Dirks.

Early Bronze Age (2500-1500 BC) saw the regular production of more sophisticated metalwork, consisting mainly of axes, daggers and 'tanged' spearheads (attached to the shaft by a prong). However, the introduction of metal tools around 2500 BC did not lead to the sudden abandonment of flint as a material for making the light tools of everyday life. In the late Neolithic (Late Stone Age), flint knapping shifted away from long blades towards shorter flakes that were sharp and strong. After about 1500 BC there was another change, towards piercing and boring implements used to work bone and hide. This tradition may well have continued into the early Iron Age.

Flint Arrowheads

Sharp flint pieces were tied to sticks to make arrows or attached to long sticks to make spears for hunting. The Indians had a number of Ohio sites where flint was mined to create points. As a matter of fact, the state mineral is flint. The most important tools were made from flint and bones. Large pieces of flint could be used to cut down small trees and strip bark from large ones. In Logan County, Ohio, a stone material known as "chert" was also mined to produce points.

An understanding of the techniques used by Bronze age copper miners has been gained in the last few years following discoveries at various ancient copper mines.

It is known that bronze age man valued copper and bronze as both artistic and practical objects. The ore was gained by using only simple stone and bone tools.

It is thought that initially raw metallic copper found on the surface would have attracted the ancients to the uses of copper.  Before long they would have started to scratch away at the surface close to these raw metal findings with simple tools made of bone.  At the Great Orme mine in Llandudno a number of bone scraping tools have been found. These would have been used to scrape away loose rock and stones from the ore vein.

The bone tools would have been of use in soft rock.  The rock at Mynydd Parys however is very hard and would have soon destroyed bone tools.  In this area significant numbers of large beach pebbles have been found.  The geology of the stone is different from the natural rock and studies suggest they may have been brought in from Porth Wen beach.

These hammer stones or mauls would have been used to pound against the rock to break it into smaller pieces. Most of these hammers would be hand held , however a few show "rills" which indicate where they may have been tied into a cleft stick to be used as a hammer.

Where the rock was too hard to be broken up by the use of hammer stones the technique of fire setting would be used. For this wood would be piled against a rock face.  A fire would be lit and the rock heated. Water would then be poured over the rock face causing it to crack and make the job of recovering the ore a lot easier.

Initially the ore would be recovered only from the surface. However later Bronze age man started to recover the ore from shallow open pits called bell pits.  At Mynydd Parys the base of some of these bell pits have been discovered up to 50 feet under ground.

Radio carbon dating of material found in the bottom of the bell pits , underground at Parys mountain have returned a date of around 3500 years ago. It is amassing to think that Bronze age man was at work on Parys mountain so long ago.

The type of copper ore recovered at Mynydd Parys contained the copper sulphur mineral called Chalcopyrite. Experiments have shown that if this is heated in an open fire some copper metal will be formed from the ore. However this is a poor and inefficient way of recovery the ore.

The ancients discovered that the ore was best processed by rough sorting and then crushing of the best ore with simple a stone pestle and mortar.  The crushed mixture would then be washed with water to recover the ore. A simple clay kiln would then be built in which the crushed ore was smelted to recover the copper. To obtain a high enough temperature in the kiln it is likely that charcoal and a bellows would have been required.  The molten copper would be recovered from the smelter and after mixing with tin and further smelting would be cast as bronze objects.

These ancient techniques worked well and the methods used out lasted the bronze age.  The Romans also used the same techniques at other copper mines and many European mines continued to use them through out the middle ages.