I would have thought that with bronze being an alloy it would have been more difficult to work with than iron, so why was it the first to become widely used?
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Copper was the first metal really used.
It could be cold-hammered into shape, or heated or melted. And it melts at a significantly lower temperature than iron. This is great when you have wood only to heat it.
Some naturally occuring deposits of copper contained other materials which resulted in basically naturally occuring bronze. Tin and arsenic both were naturally found with copper, and both when added to copper creates bronze. Generally surface copper had few of these impurities and the deeper copper had more.
So for quite some time the bronze found was ‘accidental’ bronze.
Surface copper tended to be more pure, and deeper in the ground copper had other metals – and often these other metals were found separate from the copper in the same vicinity.
A little bit of experimenting and early metalworkers discovered if you put a bit of this other component often found in close proximity to copper, you get something even better.
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