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<< News >> Copper Age began earlier than believed, scientists say

Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 11 December 2008  Page Views: 6015

DiscoveriesCountry: Serbia Serbian archaeologists say a 7,500-year-old copper axe found at a Balkan site shows the metal was used in the Balkans hundreds of years earlier than previously thought.

The find near the Serbian town of Prokuplje shifts the timeline of the Copper Age and the Stone Age's neolithic period, archaeologist Julka Kuzmanovic-Cvetkovic told the independent Beta news agency.

'Until now, experts said that only stone was used in the Stone Age and that the Copper Age came a bit later. Our finds, however, confirm that metal was used some 500 to 800 years earlier,' she said.

The Copper Age marks the first stage of humans' use of metal. It is thought to have started in about the 4th millennium BC in southeastern Europe and earlier in the Middle East.

Archaeologists at the Plocnik site also found furnace and melting pots with traces of copper, suggesting the site may have been an important metal age center of the Balkans.

'All this undeniably proves that human civilization in this area produced metal in the 5th millennium BC,' archaeologist Dusan Sljivar told Beta.

The Plocnik site was discovered in 1927 and first excavations began a year later when first neolithic items were found. It is part of the Vinca culture, Europe's biggest prehistoric civilization.

Vinca culture flourished from 6th to 3rd millennium BC in present-day Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Its name came from the village Vinca on the Danube river, some 14 kilometers downstream from Belgrade.

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"Copper Age began earlier than believed, scientists say" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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Serbian site may have hosted first copper makers by coldrum on Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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Serbian site may have hosted first copper makers

An archaeological site in southeastern Europe has shown its metal. This ancient settlement contains the oldest securely dated evidence of copper making, from 7,000 years ago, and suggests that copper smelting may been invented in separate parts of Asia and Europe at that time rather than spreading from a single source.

The find extends the known record of copper smelting by about 500 years, an archaeological team headed by Miljana Radivojević and Thilo Rehren of University College London reports in an upcoming Journal of Archaeological Science. The pair were joined by Serbian researchers, led by Dušan Šljivar of the National Museum Belgrade, and German scientists directed by Ernst Pernicka of the University of Tübingen.

Chemical and microscopic analyses of previously unearthed material from Serbia’s Belovode site have identified pieces of copper slag, the residue of an intense heating process used to separate copper from other ore elements. The raw material came from nearby copper-ore deposits in Serbia or Bulgaria, they add.

“Our finds provide the earliest secure dates for copper smelting and indicate the existence of different, possibly independent centers of invention of metallurgy,” Rehren says. Metallurgy is the process of extracting metals from ore in order to create useful objects.

Large numbers of copper artifacts have been found at southeastern European sites dating to more than 6,000 years ago, Rehren notes.

His proposal challenges a longstanding view that copper smelting spread to Europe after originating in or near the Fertile Crescent region of what’s now southern Iran. Archaeologists have dated copper smelting in the Middle East to about 6,500 years ago.

Although Belovode now stands as the world’s oldest known copper-smelting site, that status probably won’t last, remarks archaeologist Benjamin Roberts of the British Museum in London. “It’s likely we’ll see copper-smelting evidence at least contemporary with Belovode from the Fertile Crescent once research programs are in place at well-excavated sites,” he predicts.

Copper smelting may have originated in what’s now Turkey, comments archaeologist Christopher Thornton of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. By 10,000 years ago, people living there were making beads and other ornaments from copper ore and heating the ore at low temperatures to make it more pliable, he says. Scattered evidence of early smelting in that region has yet to be thoroughly studied.

Roberts and Thornton agree that copper making was probably invented in one spot, either in Turkey or the Middle East.

Rehren’s group is now examining possible copper slag from sites in Turkey and Iran that date to 7,000 years ago or more.

Radiocarbon dates for animal bones excavated at Belovode indicate that the site was occupied from 7,350 to 6,650 years ago. Jewelry and other Belovode finds come from southeastern Europe’s ancient Vinča culture, known for having used copper vessels and other metal items.

Chemical analyses of metallic-looking bits from Belovode identified five pieces of copper slag. Large amounts of iron, manganese, zinc and cobalt in this material likely derived from smelted copper ores, Rehren’s team says. Differences in the concentration of elements across samples indicate that each was produced in a separate smelting event. Slag pieces were laced with ash from wood that presumably had been burned to create smelting temperatures of about 1,100° Celsius.

Microscopic studies of slag pieces revealed glassy areas and crystallized metal oxides that had formed during a process of heating the material until it liquefied, followed by cooling.

A drop of once-molten metal found in a Belovode house contains pure copper, the researchers add.

Lead-isotope ratios of the Belovode slag and the copper drop link them to ore deposits in Serbia and Bulgaria.

No smelting chambers, such as elongated ceramic cylinders recovered at later Copper Age sites in southwestern Asia, have been found at Belovode. Vinca residents may have dug pits for copper smelting, the scientists speculate.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/60563/description/Serbian_site_may_have_hosted_first_copper_makers
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