1.1c TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN THE BRONZE AGES

• Among the preconditions of technology are geographic considerations such as the availability of natural resources.
• The technological character of irrigation works ­- the dikes, reservoirs, irrigation canals, and ditches ­- in turn affected the social and political development of lands.  
• Technology was one of a number of factors which combined to certain political conditions.
• The presence of absence of certain raw materials also had a profound effect upon the development of technologies  in  both Egypt  and Mesopotamia. As men learned to make and use items of metal, the absence, in  certain  areas,  of  tin ores for  making  alloys  of  bronze required  the  development  of trading techniques, just as the development  of  metallurgy  itself  required  the  evolution  of mining,  smelting,  and working techniques. 
• Trade and  commerce were dependent in great measure upon the evolving technology.
• Another important factor affecting the development of technology ­- and one which we can see at various times throughout history ­- was religion. 
• Both technology and science were related to religion, but in quite different ways.  Science and religion were the property of a highly educated caste which had little to do with the work of the craftsman. 

1.1b TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY IN THE STONE AGE

• Technology is as old as man himself. Not only the development of manual activity but also the development of speech guided man's earliest tool-making activities: the evolution of speech, which "gave everything a name," perhaps helped to differentiate man's world. Different tools of special types came to be used for hunting, fishing, and the making of clothes and shelters.
• Two elements governed man's technical progress: (1) discovery, the recognition and careful observation of new natural objects and phenomena, is a very subjective event until it leads to some practical application shared by others either directly or indirectly; and (2) invention, however, is a mental process in which various discoveries and observation are combined and guided by experience into some new tool or operation.
• Man's earliest conquest was fire, which was the most important discovery of Paleolithic man, who not only warmed his body but also applied fire to the preparation of food.
• As foraging, hunting, and fishing began to provide a wide range of food supply, tool-making outgrew its elementary stage.
• Man did not use stone tools only; he also used less durable materials such as wood, bone, and ivory which unfortunately have disappeared
• Only gradually, by the dawn of the Bronze Age (about 2500 B.C.), did flint mining become a separate profession, with miners living on the spot year round and probably fashioning flint tools to be traded by itinerant hawkers.
• All these products---flint, hard stone for tools, and salt together with the semi-precious stones which the prehistoric tribesmen admired, as well as sea-shells from the East---constituted the objects of trade over relatively long distances.
• Man gradually tamed such animals as roamed about his settlements or camps and which sometimes may have been scavenging. . At the same time, the deforestation and cultivation of larger areas of virgin soil began to cause extermination of wild species and to make the domesticated ones more dependent on man's care. Technology also improved in the agriculture, development of writing, urban and building revolution aspects.