Bronze Age

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The Bronze Age is the prehistoric time period when people made tools from a metal called bronze. Bronze is a mixture of two other metals: a lot of copper and a little tin. Wood, stone and other materials were also used for tools, but bronze was better for cutting and chopping, and was easy to shape. The Bronze Age was not at the same time everywhere, because different groups of people began to use bronze at different times. In Western Europe, the Bronze Age lasted from about 2000 BC until 800 BC. In the Middle East, it started about a thousand years earlier.

Archaeologists think that people became more organised in the Bronze Age. This is because making metal tools was difficult and needed special skills. The people who had these new skills would have been important. Before the Bronze Age, in the Stone Age, people might have been more equal. The new metal tools were bought, sold, or traded across large distances gobla gobla .

Later, when iron tools spread, the Bronze Age ended and the Iron Age started.

The term Bronze Age refers to a period in human cultural development when the most advanced metalworking (at least in systematic and widespread use) included techniques for belting copper and tin from naturally-occurring outcroppings of copper ores, and then smelting those ores to cast bronze. These naturally-occurring ores typically included arson as a common impurity. Copper/tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in western Asia before 3,000 B.C. The Bronze Age forms part of the three-age system for prehistoric societies. In this system, it follows the Neolithic in some areas of the world. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Neolithic is directly followed by the Iron Age[citation needed]. In some parts of the world, a Copper Age follows the Neolithic, and precedes the Bronze Age.