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Juniata College geology professor Ryan Mathur is helping change the way people think about how trade was conducted more than a millennium before Christ was born.
Mathur of Huntingdon is part of a multi-disciplinary research team that studied an ancient shipwreck to examine trade during the Bronze Age.
Mathur is a member of the team that co-authored, "Tin from Uluburun shipwreck shows small-scale commodity exchange fueled continental tin supply across Late Bronze Age Eurasia," published in a recent issue of Science Advances.
Mathur uses isotope science -- studying the properties of atoms -- to trace metal sources for modern mining industry leaders and has demonstrated its usefulness in understanding history. He applied his scientific techniques to test tin ingots found in a 14th century B.C. shipwreck. The Uluburun shipwreck was discovered in 1982 off the coast of modern day Turkey in the Mediterranean Sea.
"This ship wrecked over 3,000 years ago and was moving 10 tons of copper and 1 ton of tin. So it was like a munitions ship. Tin was very precious at the time and was used to make swords, shields and everything that everyone fought with. There were a lot of entities that needed these weapons," he said.
"It could have outfitted over 500 soldiers" had it not sunk.
The team consisted of Mathur, Wayne Powell of Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Michael Frachetti of Washington University In St. Louis; Mo. K. Aslihan Yener of Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University; Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M University; H. Arthur Bankoff of Brooklyn College-CUNY; Gojko Barjamovic of Harvard University; Michael Johnson of Stell Environmental Enterprises; Vincent C. Pigott of the University of Pennsylvania Museum; and Michael Price of Santa Fe Institute.
Each contributed to answer a long asked question -- where did the tin used to make bronze weaponry come from?
"No one could prove where any of the tin mining was happening. There were ideas that there were mines in Turkey; Cornwall, England; Germany; and Tajikistan," Mathur said. "Cornwall's mining was huge, and being in the west, a lot of people thought it was the primary source of tin throughout the Bronze Age."
Mathur's metallurgical analysis was key.
"This is the first quantitative evidence to address this problem on a relatively famous Bronze Age shipwreck," he said.
The highly desired tin was mined through many small scale operations in Turkey and prompted long-distance travel about 2,000 kilometers over mountain ranges and through deserts from Tajikistan.
"We had strong connections much farther east at a very early time," Mathur said. He became involved in the project through Powell with whom he had collaborated with on tin and bronze studies for a decade previously.
"We look at the chemistry of that and define where it came from. It sounds like the end of a story on a detective show where they come in with a clue at the end. It's a weird twist. You hear it at the end and go 'how did that happen.' To me that's what's amazing about it. We preserve the interaction that's seen in the composition of the metal."
The ingots were excavated from the shipwreck site by Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M, who had maintained the samples for decades. Mathur and Powell requested samples for analysis, and Pulak obliged even though the chemical analysis consumed the precious metal.
"Isotopes provide a fingerprint to identify where people mined the metal," said Mathur. "We've studied approximately 1,500 samples (1,000 bronze/tin artifacts and 425 tin ores) from all over the earth, so we can define ranges where the tin might have been mined. We were able to look at samples from all over the place, compare them, and come to a conclusion. It's like a miracle."
Since the publication of the Uluburun work, Mathur said other scientists are reaching out to him to apply the isotope techniques to other historical materials, including from the Viking Age.
"There are other archeological stories we can chase with this," he said.
One of those stories takes place locally at Fort Roberdeau, known as the Lead Mine Fort. Findings from that research have yet to be released by Fort Roberdeau officials.