Early Metallurgy of the Persian Gulf: Technology, Trade, and the Bronze Age World

Book Description
This volume examines the earliest production and exchange of copper and its alloys in the Persian Gulf, a major metal supply route for the Bronze Age societies of Western Asia. Weeks addresses the geological and technological background to copper production in southeastern Arabia and contextualizes evidence for major fluctuations in prehistoric copper production. The core of the volume contists of compositional and isotopic analyses. The relationship between specialized copper production, exchange, and the development of social complexity in early Arabia is examined, and the author addresses the broader archaeological issue of the Bronze Age tin trade, which linked vast areas of Western Asia, from the Indo-Iranian borderlands to the Aegean, in the third millennium BC.

About the Author
Lloyd R. Weeks, Ph.D. (2000) in near eastern archaeology, Sydney University, is a post-doctoral fellow at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University. He has published extensively on the archaeometallurgy of Arabia and conducted fieldwork in the U.A.E, Yemen, Azerbaijan, and Iran.


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During the third and second millennia BCE, the Persian Gulf functioned as a major metal supply route for Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran, and abundant cuneiform sources testify to the flourishing copper trade between the urban centers of southern Mesopotamia and the Bronze Age Gulf polities of Dilman and Magan. Weeks explores this trade, drawing on archaeo-metallurgical analyses of copper-alloy objects from sites in the United Arab Emirates. The study began as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney, but has been considerably revised since he arrived at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University, as a postdoctoral fellow. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


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