Period· The columns of time
Iron Age
1,175 BCE → 801 BCE
Iron is harder to work than bronze, and far easier to find. Where bronze had depended on trade routes that a rival could cut, iron could be dug up almost anywhere, and a decent blade came within reach of people who would never have afforded the older metal.
What the evidence shows
The difficulty is real: iron demands higher temperatures than copper and cannot simply be cast, so it must be forged and reforged, which is why it spread slowly despite the abundance of its ore. The consequence usually stressed is military, and rightly, since armies could now be equipped cheaply and in numbers. The deeper consequence is political. Controlling a tin route had been a way of deciding who could arm themselves, and that lever disappeared. In the conventional chronology this band lasts barely 400 years, one of the shortest of the cultural column.
Bounds and conventions
Its bounds are the round dates of European and Near Eastern textbooks. Elsewhere the sequence they imply breaks down: in sub-Saharan Africa iron working appears with no bronze age before it, and in the Americas no iron age follows at all. A band this short and this conventional is best read as a bookmark, not as a description.
A west Eurasian convention; African iron metallurgy follows a calendar of its own.