Tin was smelted chiefly from cassiterite, tin oxide ore, found concentrated in a comparatively small number of major deposits across the ancient world, notably in Cornwall in Britain, in the Iberian peninsula, and in central Asia, a geographic concentration that made tin one of the most actively traded metals of the Bronze Age, since bronze, an alloy of roughly nine parts copper to one part tin, required a reliable tin supply that few regions could produce locally even where copper itself was abundant. Tin melts at a notably low temperature compared to the other classical metals, is soft enough to be worked without great difficulty, and takes a bright, silvery finish, properties that also made it useful on its own for vessels, ornamental work, and, alloyed with lead, for pewter tableware widely used across medieval and early modern Europe.
A genuinely striking property of tin, observed though not explained until modern solid-state chemistry, is what is now called tin pest: prolonged exposure to sustained cold causes ordinary metallic tin to slowly convert into a crumbling, grey, non-metallic allotrope, a transformation that can spread through contact like a contagion across a stored tin object, destroying its structural integrity, a phenomenon historically blamed, memorably though anachronistically, for button failures on Napoleon's army uniforms during the bitterly cold Russian campaign, a colorful story historians treat with appropriate caution given the difficulty of verifying it against the documented timeline and conditions.