The Late Bronze Age Kurchanskaya Hoard

The paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary study of a hoard of Late Bronze Age tools found in Kurchanskaya Stanitsa (the Taman Peninsula).The hoard includes 11 tools: seven sickles, a Celtic axe, a knife, a fragment of an adze, a fragment of a socketed chisel.The complex containing intact and damaged tools is attributed as a treasure trove of a foundry master.The alloy of sickles, adze and knife is low-arsenic bronze, which can be correlated with the Kuban metallurgy province.The ornamented socketed chisel and the celt are cast from an alloy containing tin in its composition, the recipe of which is more in line with the European (Carpathian) metallurgical province.Three hoards discovered on the Taman Peninsula contained complete specimens of bronze sickles.This indicates that in the late Bronze Age, high-quality reaping tools were in demand by the population of Taman, and gives reason to assume that its economic activity was focused on the cultivation of cereal crops

Ancient history · Archaeology · Bronze · Bronze Age · Chisel · Geography · Hoard · Peninsula · Population · Pottery · Treasure · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Demography · History · Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts