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 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.
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