Iran and the Bronze Age Metals Trade in the Persian Gulf

Title
Iran and the Bronze Age Metals Trade in the Persian Gulf
Publication Date
2016
Author(s)
Weeks, Lloyd
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4736-9633
Email: lweeks2@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:lweeks2
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
The Society of Iranian Archaeology
Place of publication
Islamic Republic of Iran
UNE publication id
une:19769
Abstract
Archaeometallurgical research in the U.A.E. and Oman has demonstrated that local Bronze Age societies undertook copper production on a very large scale, providing solid evidence for the identification of this region as the land of Magan known in Mesopotamian sources as a key supplier of copper in the later 3rd millennium b.c. However, consideration of the textual, archaeological and archaeometallurgical evidence from across the greater Persian Gulf region indicates a more complex exchange system conditioned not only by raw material sources and trade routes, but by politics and warfare, by technological traditions of manufacture and recycling, by ideologies of elite consumption, and by the social obligations that created and underpinned exchange relationships. A great deal of work remains to be done to demonstrate the likely contribution of Iranian polities to this system.
Link
Citation
International Journal of the Society of Iranian Archaeologists, 2(3), p. 13-25
ISSN
2423-3412
Start page
13
End page
25

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