Comments on 'Oxhide Ingots, Recycling, and the Mediterranean Metals Trade'

Abstract

This article adds another to the adversarial papers from the Bradford group with no new evidence or scientific data and a liberal sprinkling of misunderstandings and misquotations. Their article calls to mind the comment by Bass (1973) on another paper: "The article must be read with care, as Muhly seems either not to have read all of the sources he cites, or not to have understood them". To take one example: they quote Knapp (1990) as a source for their statement that the consensus view shifted away from a Lavrion origin for the oxhide ingots found in the eastern Mediterranean towards a potential Cypriot source. Knapp's paper contains no statement that any oxhide ingot was made of copper from Lavrion and no statement that any author had ever made such a claim. To our knowledge there is nowhere to be found any such idea in the whole literature on oxhide ingots. A more serious example is their accusation that our latest published data set for Cypriot ores (Stos-Gale and Gale 1994) has presented five samples which are changed from our previous publications by only one ratio. Of these, two were not previously published at all, two have precisely the same ratios as in Stos-Gale, Gale and Zwicker (1986), whilst one was misprinted in Spooner and Gale (1982). Budd et at. 1995 repeat yet again that the lead isotope compositions of deposits in Sierra de Cartagena, Oman and the Negev overlap those of Cyprus. To the contrary, examination of all the data (Gale 1991) showed that there is no such overlap. Again contra their implications, Gale and Stos-Gale (1988) did not state that the ingots from the Minoan palace of Hagia T riadha on Crete were made from Sardinian copper. In fact we firmly concluded that there was no evidence whatsoever for the import of Sardinian copper into Minoan Crete.