Happy fall! September’s Executive Board Reading Recommendation comes from SAS VP for Social Media Vana Orfanou. Vana has selected a recently-published paper in Journal of Archaeological Science by J. Montes Landa and colleagues, titled “Towards a new history of bronze making: Explaining the selection of tin bronze alloying techniques across prehistoric N.E. Iberia (2100-200BC).” 

Vana writes: This paper presents comprehensive analytical evidence to address one of the standing challenges in archaeometallurgy: How and when can we pinpoint technological choices linked to specific metallurgical operations such as natural alloying, co-smelting, mixing and recycling of copper-based alloys. The paper by J. Montes Landa et al. contextualises the microanalytical traces of a range of metallurgical features along with a theoretical framework in a way that, I expect, will be very useful to researchers of past metallurgies. In the authors’ own words, this work aims to “explain the logic behind the selection of bronze alloying techniques in different contexts, avoiding deterministic, aprioristic and linear narratives”, a direction much needed in the interdisciplinary pursuit of reconstructing past complex technologies.

Montes-Landa, J., Pons, E., Rovira, C., Moya, A., Alonso, N., Martinón-Torres, M., 2025. Towards a new history of bronze making: Explaining the selection of tin bronze alloying techniques across prehistoric N.E. Iberia (2100-200BC). Journal of Archaeological Science 178, 106206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106206

Fig. 1. Diagram illustrating the factors affecting alloying techniques selection. Colours indicate different technological traditions involving a specific combination of alloying techniques.