The people living in Bronze Age Cornwall were miners and traders. They made their tin (and copper to a lesser extent at the time) accessible to a wide variety of trading partners. Even the gold of the Nebra Sky Disk (ca. 1600 BCE) has been sourced to Cornwall.

Because of the wealth of their mineral resources, the people living in the far south west British peninsula had periods of opulence, and they often had far-reaching trade partners. They would have resisted settlement from people as far away as the Egyptians and the Hittites who would have regarded a Cornish outpost as beyond the limits of their sphere of influence and political power. An outpost was not needed, however, as long as there were willing trading partners.