Back to the Bronze Age calendar

You’ll never believe this but the Bronze Age started because people discovered how to make bronze. Bronze cannot be found in the ground like stone or flint. Bronze is made up of a mixture of tin and copper. It is about 90% copper and 10% tin. Copper is a metal found in rocks. It is a fairly weak metal though quite difficult to break. It can be made into different shapes using your hands.

However, if you mix copper with tin you get bronze and bronze was the strongest metal known to people at this time. At first tin was found in rivers, chiefly in Cornwall, and then people started to dig mines to find tin underground.

England was lucky because it had copper and tin. The biggest copper mines could go down almost 70 metres or the height of ten normal houses. The amazing thing was that people only had their hands and stone age tools to dig with.

Not all places in Europe had tin and copper so people from other parts of Europe would come to trade with the people who lived in England.

As bronze was a hard metal, it was good to make swords and axes but it was also used to make fine jewellery and knives. I wonder who first discovered if you add tin and copper together you get a stronger metal. Weren't they clever?

Just in case you are wondering, it was not in England that people first found out how to make bronze. This came from Asia. I suppose the Bronze Age people might have been called the Copper and Tin people but then they would have gone rusty in the rain.

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