I've read (in the Penguin atlas of ancient history, the Sumerians lost access to tin at one point and fell temporarily back into the Chalcolithic.)

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Long distance trade declined toward the end of the Late Bronze Age — and in the Early/Middle Iron Age was increasingly carried out by private merchants rather than state-sponsored expeditions — but continued nonetheless. Imported materials like lapis and tin were still available and used in the Early Iron Age.

To quote Sarah Murray’s The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy (2017),

>Snodgrass originally argued that the use of bronze in Greece decreased after the LBA because the supply of tin, which must have been brought to Greece from far away to the East or North, was cut off at the end of the Bronze Age, forcing Greeks to find a new metal from which to make their tools and weapons. According to this bronze shortage theory, trade routes bringing copper and tin to Greece broke down just after some areas of Greece had learned the art of ironworking from Cyprus. When they could no longer obtain copper and tin, Greeks turned their metallurgical attention to forging iron (in places like Euboea where they had learned how to do it) or to the recycling of old Mycenaean bronzes (in places like West Greece where they had not). Bronze became more abundant again when trade with the east was reestablished around 900.

>This theory has been controversial. Morris questioned the bronze shortage hypothesis on the grounds that it draws too simple a connection between deliberately deposited metal artifacts and originally circulating quantities of metal. He argued that the prominence of iron in burial assemblages during the EIA reflects new social strategies that were put into place by an emergent elite that used a different metal to set itself apart within society. In this view, the use of iron for tools and jewelry was not the outcome of need generated by the lack of a preferable metal, bronze. Rather, changes in the socially determined meaning of metals led to different types of deliberate deposition, which is what we see in the archaeological record. We might also imagine that as iron became more common in the PG period, demand for bronze would have declined, because metal made from a local ore had replaced many uses of the old exogenous resource. In any case, the notion that tin was in short supply in the EIA has found little support from analyses of bronze objects, which have normal to high tin contents. Snodgrass has now stepped back from his original position, and most scholars have followed suit, questioning just how much access to tin waned…

Schliemann's excavations at Troy were the first case that we learned about in my survey-level archeology course at university. Was he an excellent archaeologist? No. Was he better than most the people at the time who just dug things up and washed them off and sold them? Yes (although he also did that).

That's simply amazing

"I raised him better than that!"

Yep dude more than likely found it and then proceeded to blow it and several other layers of interest up with dynamite

yes, and by way of trade networks made it all the way to the mediterranean to make bronze

I thought that Uzbekistan and Afghanistan is where the tin was coming from?

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I think they preferred traveling by boat.

It might be a little out of date but there's a great documentary called In Search Of Troy that's still worth watching.

EDIT: doh, it's In Search of the Trojan War. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CkbUQKyie_w

As I understand it, a key way to differentiate a neanderthal camp from a homo sapien camp is the the neanderthals only have locally sourced materials and homo sapiens have goods from all over Eurasia.

The level that Schliemann declared to be the one associated with the events in the Iliad was, in fact, a lot older than the Mycenean era, during which the Trojan War would have taken place.

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Troy? or a city we think may have been Troy there's so much conjecture around this but we just keep calling it troy

For a second I had to quickly scroll up halfway through your comment to see if we were going to end up with mankind getting thrown off the cage in the "hell in the cell" match

We know that that kings would send gifts of gold to each other which would be melted down and repurposed. We have a letter to Ahkenaten's mom complaining about some fake gold statues sent by Ahkenaten

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Ah, thanks.

The goods travel farther than any one trader. Valuable items like gold might change hands many times before they reach their final buyer.

I’ll add that materials like tin and lapis lazuli were not the products of direct trade between the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia; they were passed along by a series of middlemen. For example, the Mycenaeans obtained amber from people in central Europe, who acquired it from the Baltic, ostrich feathers and eggshells from the Egyptians, who got them from Nubia, and so on. Tin would’ve been imported to Mesopotamia from states further east like Elam (in what is now Iran), which acquired it from the city-states of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (awkwardly named, I know) in what is now Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.

This is very different from the direct trade between regions via donkey caravans or ships — the Old Assyrian trade between Anatolia and the Assyrian city of Aššur, the 3rd/2nd millennium BCE trade between southern Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, the trade expeditions between Egypt and the Horn of Africa, etc.

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You're right in thinking of the city, it's just widely assumed that the site in Hisarlik corresponds to the Troy from the Trojan War. It's not 100% confirmed though, but fairly well accepted.