Serbian site shows the oldest known copper-makersFinds intensify debate over Old World origins of metal productionAn 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.
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