After more than two millennia of stone being used to make tools and weapons, in the last few thousand years metals have transformed technology. In the Old World the main area of earliest metalworking extends from Bulgaria in the west, through Anatolia and into Iran. Metals also existed in concentrations in the deserts of Egypt, and there are indications that metalworking started at an early date in Southeast Asia.
Copper Age (5500-2100 BC)
Copper was one of the first metals to be exploited by man because, like gold, it occurs in the native form, pure and requiring no smelting. When copper was first introduced it was scarce and so the use of stone continued alongside copper until much later. The terms Chalcolithic (‘copper-stone’) and Eneolithic or Aeneolithic (‘bronze-stone’) are sometimes used to describe these periods.
The earliest known copper objects are from levels dated c.7000 BC at Cayonu Tepesi in southern Turkey. The oldest complete body ever recovered from prehistory is Similaun Man, found in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991. Among the seventy objects he was carrying was a copper-tipped axe. His remains have been dated to 3300 BC and this suggests that the use of copper has existed in Europe for at least 5300 years.
A vital step in the development of metallurgy was the discovery of smelting – the high-temperature process by which pure metal can be extracted from its ore. Shaping could have been done by hammering, which also hardened the metal. But when smelting presented the metal in molten form the possibilities of casting must have soon been recognised.
In the Balkan area, copper mines existed in the fourth millennium BC at Rudna Glava in Serbia and Aibunar in Bulgaria. The Late Copper Age in central-west Europe was dominated by the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker pottery, with elements of both apparently continuing into the succeeding Bronze Age.
Bronze Age (3500-500 BC)
Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, the optimum proportion being about nine parts of copper to one part of tin. It has a number of advantages of pure copper: a lower melting point, it is harder, and above all it is easier to cast without flaws. Tin and copper do not normally occur naturally in proximity and this resulted in a significant rise in trade, which led to the rapid diffusion of ideas and was an important factor in the progressive differentiation of status.
In Europe the Bronze Age conventionally spans the period (c.2200-c.800 BC). Metalwork centres were established in the Aegean (Minoan/Mycenaean), central Europe (Unetice), Spain (Argaric), Britain (Wessex), Ireland and Scandinavia. During the Later Bronze Age, the great folk movements led to the spread of the Urnfield culture (c.1300-c.750 BC).
Iron Age (500-00-800)
The technique of smelting is more complicated than with copper or tin, since the first smelt gives only an unpromising slaggy lump, the bloom. Hammering at red heat expels stone fragments. Pure iron is too soft for functional use and combining carbon (0.1-1.7 % by weight) with the iron makes steel. Once the technique was discovered it replaced earlier metallurgies because iron ores are much more common than those of copper or tin and the resulting metal is far superior.
The technique of iron working was mastered c.1500 BC by the Hittites. When they were overthrown c.1100 BC and their secret leaked out, the knowledge of iron spread rapidly and it replaced bronze as tools as weapons. In Europe the transition to the Iron Age is conventionally placed at the beginning of the first millennium BC: Villanovan (c.900-c.700 BC), Hallstatt (c.800-c.450 BC), and La Tene (c.450-1st century BC).
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