Late Bronze Age Oxhide and oxhide‐like ingots from areas other than the Mediterranean: problems and challenges

Abstract

Summary Oxhide ingots are probably one of the most remarkable metal artefacts that ever circulated throughout the Mediterranean during the second millennium BC. From the Levantine coast to Sardinia, oxhide ingots were produced, exchanged, used and transformed for almost six centuries (c.1600–1100/1000 BC). They are generally regarded as a class of material that is found only in the Mediterranean area. However, there are a number of oxhide ingots that have been encountered far beyond the coasts of the Mediterranean. The aim of this paper is to throw some light on these items and their significance in order to increase our understanding of the complex and far‐reaching Bronze Age metal supply networks in Europe. The application of a commodity branding model also allows the possibility of achieving a deeper understanding of these items as tokens of the long‐lasting links between Continental Europe and the Mediterranean.

The spread of steppe and Iranian-related ancestry in the islands of the western Mediterranean

“…We find no evidence of substantial proportions of Iranian-related ancestry in the Balearic islands or Sardinia until the Phoenician period, but this does not mean that these islands were isolated from the eastern Mediterranean, and indeed the opposite is true. Archaeological evidence shows that this was a period of unprecedented material culture exchange, with substantial westward flows of goods as reflected for example in the importation of Cypriot copper in Late Bronze Age Sardinia 92 .…”

Late Bronze Age Metal Exploitation and Trade: Sardinia and Cyprus

“…An enormous body of scholarly literature on Mediterranean LBA metal trade exists, not least on the oxhide ingot phenomenon, which is not possible to summarize in this paper. In more recent years attention has been drawn to the fact that evidence of familiarity with oxhide ingots is not limited to the Mediterranean basin, but stretches to continental Europe and Scandinavia, [58][59][60] therefore well beyond the long known finds from the Oberwilflingen hoard, in Germany. [61] Scholarly literature on metal trade in continental Europe matches in size its counterpart on the Mediterranean.…”

“…[79,80] There is still no consensus as to the copper source used for some of the earliest oxhide ingots (recovered in Crete), [74] but after the fourteenth century BC, and with the remarkable exception of some of the fragments from the Ballao-Funtana Coberta hoard [81] and the Pattada-Sedda Ottinnera hoard [69] in Sardinia (see below), oxhide ingots seem to become a sort of Cypriot branded good over nearly three centuries. [59,[82][83][84] Their distribution, chronology, miniature manufacture, figurative representations on different materials and means, presence in ritual/funerary and cultic contexts or in association with metallurgical activities creates a multifaceted picture. [33,[58][59][60]80,[85][86][87][88][89] The geographical and chronological spread of such evidence suggests that the distribution pattern of oxhide ingots was with all probability even larger than what the archeological record currently tells us.…”

Rock Art and Trade Networks: From Scandinavia to the Italian Alps

“…They emphasize the images of bulls, wagons/chariots and bihorned warrior figures, and they draw attention to recent findings of rock art oxhide ingots in Scandinavia that are quite similar to Late Minoan pillow ingots (cf. Sabatini, 2016). The ingots are also depicted during later phases, and Ling and Uhnér (2015, p. 30) suggest that the panels with the ingots, depicted alongside ships and warriors, may represent prominent meeting places (with reference to Fredell, 2003, p. 221) and possibly places where metal was brought in and then distributed further.…”