I should have taken a landscape portrait, but it was before breakfast. |
Five weeks ago I went to visit my sister's family in Kamloops, and the familiar landscape of the Okanagan-Shushwap inspired me to respond to a reposting at Brad Delong's joint of some material from Pamela Crone's batshit "Hagarism" controversy.
I can't say that the sources of ancient tin have the same personal resonance for me, but the subject did come up over at Delong's, and I do feel that I have to issue a defence and expansion. I do not, personally, have strong opinions about where the ancients got their tin, but scholars I respect have arguments that are not getting their due. And given that the conversation is at an economical history blog, the fact that Niall Sharples ties tin to a "general glut" argument is germane, and ought to earn him some attention.
It won't, of course, because he wrote a scholarly monograph about Social Relations in Later Prehistory and not some attention grabbing work of debatable generalisation, but all you can do is put it out there and hope it gets some attention.
As you can see, a solid chunk of cassiterite is conspicuous and valuable in its own right. By CarlesMillan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20842834 |