Why did they still wear bronze armor when already wielded iron weapons for cencuries?

[Julianus]

This is a question which puzzled me for a long time.
In EB most weapons are iron-made iirc, however for armor the prevailing material is still bronze.
Why couldn't they made decent iron armor when there was no such problem for iron weapons?

[Nightbringer]

my guess would be that the more complex shapes of armor (compared to weapons) were more difficult to make in iron because it is a very brittle metal and needed more complex iron-working techniques.
That is based on exactly nothing...

[Arjos]

Bronzeworkers were at their finest and continually improving to keep control of the "industry", and as Nightbringer said iron wasn't that easy to handle...
Bronze was at a stage that could be shaped into any armour, iron on the other hand was something only the aristocracy could afford...
Needless to say by a later period (1st century BC more or less), iron was mastered and even steel was made...

[Ludens]

Actually, bronze is harder than wrought iron: according to Wikipedia Roman officers actually preferred bronze swords. However, bronze requires tin, and there are not that many places where tin is available. There's a theory that the iron-age started because the tin trading-routes got disrupted. Whether or not this is true, once the required techniques had been developed, iron armaments were simply cheaper than their bronze counterparts.

[Saldunz]

Are the "iron" weapons in EB's supposed to be made of wrought iron or of steel? I had thought the weapons of the "iron age" were by and large made of steel and not wrought iron.

And if that is the case, then I'm also curious as to why steel would be used for weapons, but bronze for armour! Any archaeology experts present?

[bobbin]

Most of the armour in EB is made of Iron from what I remember. Bronze was harder but also very expensive so only the richest would use it.

AFAIK almost all the iron used on EB's map was wrought iron and so much softer that bronze. This softness made it much easier to work with and repair though, which couple with it's cheapness made it's use widespread.

[Arjos]

So many different opinions, wow gotta cite my source here...
The Prehistory of Germanic Europe by H. Schutz...
Also mentions the discovery of "real bronze", which is 9 parts copper and 1 tin, I knew of loss of raw materials, coupled with the discovery of iron deposits (instead of the surface one), brought iron to be commoner, maybe by 300 BC iron was already well mastered, but there was a general decline in prosperity, I always connected iron with the emergence of warlords and a new political structure in the Celtic world around 200 BC...

[Cyclops]

I imagine a few things kept bronze in use: bronze was a high status metal associated with long established trade routes and there was an entrenched technology embedded in many societies military, economic and social systems. I think its much prettier too. In ancient China there are references to bronze vs "the ugly metal" which is prolly iron.

IIRC bronze can be "cold-worked" just by banging it so maybe it had a good re-use/repair aspect. I think it did make better breastplates for the reasons mentioned (you can beat it cold and shape it without it shattering).

I think iron has to be heated to a higher temperature to make it into steel so its harder than bronze but you can make crappy iron at a similar temp and its relatively cheaper, but it corrodes like hell...geez its been too long since I did my basic European Iron Age Archaeology course with Chris Gosden...hope I haven't got that all wrong, he was an excellent teacher but on the other hand I was a heavy drinker...

Does the de-population of SW Ireland coincide with the rise of iron and a dip in the Atlantic tin and copper trade? IITC the rise of the Kelts is associated with iron working too.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Are the "iron" weapons in EB's supposed to be made of wrought iron or of steel? I had thought the weapons of the "iron age" were by and large made of steel and not wrought iron.

Some weapons might, but not necessarily all. For one thing the steel your refer to would (probably) be the same steel as that of the Viking swords of the early medieval ages, i.e nothing like the can of canned foodstuffs at all. No cokes or industrial blast furnaces, you see.

So what you have then is very small quantities of steel being produced, requiring a relatively large amount of skill to make (you need to temper it properly and without thermometers or chronometers...), also the way the sword is shaped is not entirely straightforward (the inner parts of the sword require different metallurgical properties from the outer layers, for instance the inner layers need to be a bit bendy so the sword doesn't snap but the outer ones may need to be sharp & hard for the sword to be effective depending on its use) and you need to have ore with sufficient carbon content for steel to form at all.

Even then, sword fighting techniques often involved avoiding hitting any kind of armour or shields (i.e. go for the leg or neck) because doing so might well damage the sword; and even with such techniques sword finds often involve battle damage. So in short, steel is not nearly as reliable as the white or gothic plate armour of the 15th century. Despite all that, the sword is probably among the most expensive (if not the most expensive) piece of kit your average soldier was able to afford; he might not even be able to afford a good quality sword like that (you can use a spear or you could use a bronze sword).

By contrast the requirements for armour are much less demanding: be wearable (i.e. not too heavy), be affordable and be though. None of those requirements imply steel, and right up till the late Medieval ages you could get by without it. For that purpose solid bronze cuirasses are actually overkill, and more than likely a status symbol of the wearer.

[oudysseos]

Another factor to consider is that bronze lasts much longer than iron, that is, it doesn't corrode to the point where it becomes unusable, whereas iron can rust very quickly. So bronze weapons and armour can be passed down from one generation to the next in a way that is impractical for iron artefacts.

It's also important not to bark up the wrong tree: video game players are often focused on stats that were meaningless to the real people involved. What I mean by that is that the Romans didn't say "Well the Vickers hardness of wrought iron is 45 compared to 127 for bronze but the iron has an AP rating of 3...." Iron ore was abundant, and while copper was as well, tin is not so much and also the two are not usually found together. The upshot is that bronze almost always requires trade, while it is possible for iron to be a local industry, once the difficulties of producing useful implements are overcome. The supersession of bronze by iron for weapons is a question of economics and geopolitics more than materials engineering.

[Arjos]

Yeah, I mostly referred to the La Tene-Hallstatt area, I don't even know of any other steel than Noricum's during EB time frame...
I think for the Romani the major iron deposits were in the Elba isle, and the Etruscan territories...
I agree it would be an econo-political choice, but only after the furnaces to properly work iron were available...

[Brennus]

Dammit, I wish I had arrived earlier to this thread, all the reasons have been stated.... Ah well back to my books.

[Watchman]

Just to add, since these didn't seem to have been mentioned yet (at least according to a cursory eyeballing):

Iron is cheap but rather tricky to work compared to bronze, all the more so given that the smiths and miners and whatnots were still trying to figure out a lot of stuff. Period reduction and smithing techniques made large solid iron pieces particularly difficult to construct, which is why you don't much see monolith-plate pieces bigger than a helmet or a greave. The Hellenistics did apparently manage to put together some solid-plate cuirasses, but given the armoursmithing skill levels involved those must have been horrendously expensive - and given the limitations of period ironworking would seem rather unlikely to offer any kind of advantage over the tried-and-true bronze corselet (which nigh certainly had rather better protection-to-weight ratio too). OTOH one would assume that such a harness, properly polished, would cut a striking figure indeed - a silvery spot among all the bronze, I'm guessing.
Isn't conspicuous consumption cool? ;)

When it comes to smaller stuff like scale armour, I'm guessing it was rather less time-consuming and labour-intensive to cast the bits en masse rather than work them individually out of iron - AFAIK there's no meaningful difference in "stopping power" in that use, so the question would probably have boiled down to the difference between the higher price of bronze (fluctuating by availability) and the greater man-hour costs of the iron (and of course customer preference and similar sundry).

In weapons OTOH the far lower price of iron rather obviously dominated the field, plus from what I've read of it the metallurgical qualities of bronze place an upper limit on how long a single-piece sword blade you can make out of it - whereas the potential length of an iron one is pretty much only limited by the craftsman's skill. (Though long ones still cost like the dickies compared to short ones, on account of being rather a lot more difficult to make.)

[geala]

Although bronze was much more expensive than iron, it could be laboured to big thin sheets easier and given hardness by the relatively easy method of cold hammering. It could reach 250 HV with this method. Cold hammered iron can reach 200 HV, mild steel 150 to 250 HV, wrought iron below 100 HV (see also linked Wiki article).

In weapons it was a bit different. From the late Halstatt period onwards methods for hardening the steel were developed that made iron weapons a better choice than bronze ones. Steel, even mild one but especially hardened steel, can hold a sharp edge much better than bronze and that was in my opinion the reason for the use of iron in the field of weapons. Hardened steel (that is steel with a certain amount of carbon, quench hardened) made with ancient methods can reach up to nearly 800 HV. Modern kitchen knifes have ususally around 700 HV.

To give an example: Roman infantry swords of the Mainz type (early first c. AD) were regularly hardened. The core of seven swords found in the Rhineland in Germany was around 500 HV, the steel near the edges 600 to 770 HV. It is interesting that many examples of later Roman infantry swords of the Pompeii type (second half first c. AD) were made from far less hardened steel, reaching 150 to 212 HV. It is presumed that the rather compact form of the Pompeii type swords made extrem hardening unnecessary; the weapons must have been very ductile and nearly unbreakable.