Early iron metallurgy in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The appearance of iron in southwest Asia in the late second to early first millennium BCE is currently understood as a complex social phenomenon, and yet pinpointing even broad details of a technological emergence that led to a full-fledged Iron Age has proven to be a major challenge. Since the work commemorated in the volume The Coming of the Age of Iron (1980), archaeometallurgical scholarship has slowly improved a soft focus on how various societies came to adopt iron into their metallurgical repertoire. This paper will highlight developments in the field over the past 50 years, celebrating the innovative contributions of Vince Pigott and his colleagues and the work that grew from their seminal research. To conclude, new research on early iron in the eastern Mediterranean will be discussed, emphasizing bi-directional influences of bronze and iron from technological, social, and economic perspectives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Archaeometallurgy, Eurasia and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Vince Pigott

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51284