Additional tickets for this talk will be released at 7pm on Tuesday 24th March.

Join us online for a special talk by Dr Benjamin Roberts, Associate Professor of Later European Prehistory at Durham University, on the Bronze-Iron Age tin trade across Europe and the Mediterranean and its links to Cornwall.

Date: Tuesday 31st March
Time: 6.30pm – 7.30pm
Location: Online

Price: Pay as you feel (£5, £10 or £15)

In around 2200 BCE, Britain and Ireland were the first regions in Europe to completely switch over from copper to bronze metal, typically with around 10% tin. This change spread across the rest of Bronze Age Europe and the Mediterranean over the following centuries. As Cornwall and Devon possessed the richest tin deposits in Europe, readily accessible in numerous valleys with relatively easy access to the sea for trading, there has long been speculation that tin from this region was traded across the continent.

In this talk, Dr Roberts explores ‘Project Ancient Tin’, which sought to ‘fingerprint’ tin ores to tin artefacts from Britain to the East Mediterranean to re-evaluate the European Bronze Age (c.2200–800 BCE) tin trade.

The results of the project not only demonstrate the existence of an international tin trade from Cornwall and Devon that reached as far as the southern Levant by c. 1300 BCE, but suggest a far larger scale and impact than has previously been appreciated.

Archaeological evidence for Bronze Age tin workings has been growing in recent years, and it is proposed that tin production was decentralised, with agriculture still dominant but with numerous small alluvial tin workings. The tin would be taken to coastal Ictis-type trading places as famously described by the traveller Pytheas of Massalia in c.320 BCE.

In seeking to understand these potential tin trading places, a new collaborative pilot project undertook a survey and the first-ever excavations at St Michael’s Mount, located in the heart of the tin mining district of West Cornwall and long thought to have been the Ictis of the Classical sources.

About Dr Roberts

Dr Benjamin Roberts is an Associate Professor of Later European Prehistory at the Department of Archaeology, Durham University. He led the Leverhulme-funded ‘Project Ancient Tin: Did British tin sources and trade make Bronze Age Europe?’

Before joining Durham, he was the Curator for the European Bronze Age collections in the British Museum, where he researched and co-wrote the first 40 programmes of ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. His research focuses on understanding the transmission of new ideas, objects and technologies across Bronze Age Europe, North Africa and Asia.

The talk is pay as you feel with tickets priced at £5, £10 or £15.

Numbers are restricted and places are available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Cornwall Heritage Trust is recording the event and may publish this in a variety of media and online.

This event is in aid of Cornwall Heritage Trust.

Additional tickets released

Whilst this event is currently sold out, we’re thrilled to announce that we are now able to release a limited number of additional tickets.

We know how popular this talk has proven to be and will therefore be releasing these additional tickets at 7pm on Tuesday 24th March, to give as many of you as possible a fair chance of securing a place.