Bronze is nine parts copper and one part tin, and the tin is the part that changes everything. This is the correction I had to make about how the Bronze Age actually worked, and what the ratio cost the people living in it.

Flint is the channel's recurring illustrated guide, not a historical person. The episode covers why copper alone is a poor material, where the tin had to come from, the cargo of the Uluburun wreck and what its ratio proves, the isotope work tracing Mediterranean tin to sources thousands of kilometres away, and why a civilisation that depends on one thin supply line has a problem it cannot see.

00:00 Correcting a Bronze Age assumption
00:47 Why tin transforms copper into bronze
02:01 Tin scarcity versus copper abundance
03:30 Uluburun shipwreck cargo evidence
05:23 Bronze recycling distorts the record
07:02 Tin isotope tracing to Cornwall
08:23 Relay trade with no single route
11:00 Supply lines not knowledge decided power
11:57 Late Bronze Age collapse and fragility
13:44 Iron wins through local availability
15:35 Survival bias in archaeology
17:58 Uluburun as inventory not treasure

#history #archaeology #economics

Sources:
• Pulak (1998) - The Uluburun Shipwreck: An Overview - International Journal of Nautical Archaeology
• Berger and others (2019) - Isotope Systematics and Chemical Composition of Tin Ingots from Mochlos and Other Bronze Age Sites - PLOS ONE
• Muhly (1985) - Sources of Tin and the Beginnings of Bronze Metallurgy - American Journal of Archaeology
• Radivojević and others (2019) - The Provenance, Use and Circulation of Metals in the European Bronze Age - Journal of World Prehistory
• Cline (2014) - 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed - Princeton University Press