Two valuable cargoes
Tin and amber were both goods that came from a limited number of places and were wanted far from where they were found. Tin, mixed with copper, makes bronze, so societies of the Bronze Age that lacked tin depended on distant sources. Amber, fossilised tree resin, was prized for jewellery and ornaments and is plentiful along parts of the Baltic coast. Both are good examples of how ancient maritime commerce linked regions that never met directly, with goods changing hands several times along the way.
A caution applies throughout. Much of what is said about these trades comes from fragmentary archaeological finds and from Greek and Roman authors writing about places they had not necessarily visited. Where the evidence is thin, historians disagree, and the details below should be read as the main outlines rather than settled facts.
Tin from the Atlantic fringe
Tin deposits occur in Cornwall and Devon in south-west Britain, in north-western Iberia, in Brittany and in other places in Europe. Evidence from ingots and analysis of metal suggests that tin from several regions entered circulation at different times. How far Atlantic tin reached the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age is debated. Studies of ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck, which sank off the Turkish coast in the later fourteenth century BC, have raised questions about where the tin they contain came from, and scholars have proposed sources in Central Asia and elsewhere as well as in the west.
Later sources are clearer about the Atlantic trade. The Phoenicians, who founded Gadir, now Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, are believed to have brought metals from Iberia and perhaps further north, and their wider seafaring is discussed under Phoenician harbours. Greek merchants from Massalia, now Marseille, are thought to have obtained tin via overland and river routes across Gaul as well as by sea. The explorer Pytheas of Massalia, in the fourth century BC, reportedly sailed to Britain and beyond, and later writers drew on his lost account.
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC and drawing on earlier sources, described people in the south-west of Britain who processed tin and carried it to an island called Ictis, accessible at low tide, from where traders took it to Gaul. The location of Ictis is uncertain; St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Mount Batten in Plymouth Sound are among the candidates, and no firm identification exists.
The boats of the Atlantic coasts
Direct evidence for boats is limited. The Dover Bronze Age boat, discovered in 1992 and dated to roughly 1500 BC, was a substantial sewn plank vessel that could have worked across the Channel, and similar finds elsewhere in Britain show that sewn-plank boats existed. Skin boats, dugouts and plank-built vessels were probably used for different tasks. The details of a sea-going Bronze Age merchant vessel in the Atlantic are not well known.
The best written description of northwest European ships comes from Julius Caesar, who campaigned against the Veneti of Brittany in 56 BC. He described their ships as built of oak, with high bows and sterns, flat bottoms for tidal waters, and sails made of leather. He regarded them as better suited to the Atlantic than Roman galleys, and the Veneti controlled much of the coastal trade with Britain, according to his account. These craft, as described, differ from the Mediterranean ships of the period, and their story belongs to the wider history of the Atlantic crossings and coastal routes of western Europe.
Amber from the Baltic
Amber from the southern Baltic coast was traded across Europe from prehistoric times, and amber objects occur in graves in the Mediterranean world, including Mycenaean Greece. Routes ran along rivers and overland corridors as well as by coast, so the sea portion was only part of the journey. The Baltic itself was crossed in boats of plank or skin construction, and later seafaring there is described under Hanseatic Baltic trade.
In the Roman period the demand rose. Pliny the Elder, in the first century AD, wrote about amber and described an expedition sent under the emperor Nero to gather large quantities for gladiatorial games, though the precise route is not known. The historian Tacitus mentioned a people on the Baltic shore, the Aestii, who collected amber and sold it without knowing its use. The old overland route linking the Baltic with the Adriatic, often called the Amber Road, brought material to places such as Aquileia, a major Roman centre for working amber.
What the sea contributed
Sea transport mattered because it moved heavy or bulky goods more cheaply than carrying them overland, and because some stretches of coast, like the Atlantic seaboard and the Baltic, were easier to travel by water than by land. Even so, the pattern was often a mix of coastal sailing, river transport and overland carriage, with goods passed from one community to the next rather than moved by a single merchant over the whole distance. The influence of Roman naval and merchant shipping, covered under Roman navy fleets, extended this network in later centuries, bringing more regular supply to northern frontiers.
Why it matters
The tin and amber trades show that coastal communities across Europe were connected long before the age of chartered companies, with specialised producers, middlemen and consumers. They also illustrate the limits of the evidence: absent ship remains and written records, historians must infer from artefacts, metal analysis and the accounts of outsiders. Continuing underwater and field archaeology may change the picture, and new analyses of metal sources have already done so more than once.