Gerry makes an interesting post. One problem in our
discussions so far is the rather vague nature of what constitutes 'bronze'.
Bronze is a word like 'steel', i.e., it speaks to a **range**
of alloys. The literature I've read seems to prefer 'arsenical copper'
for non-tin 'bronze'.
The online Britannica goes into the various recipes for
copper+ 'bronze'. If you go too far afield, you get a 'brass'. There is a
paragraph there that says iron won out mostly because the known copper and/or
tin deposits had become exhausted.
Arsenical copper is copper with a little arsenic.
Arsenic, it seems, often occurs naturally in copper deposits, and what the
ancient metallurgists got was nature's own brew. In any event, a little arsenic
made for a better copper.
Mark.