by Chris Fowler
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* Received March 2009, revised December 2011
CHAPTER 35
THE FIRST METALWORK AND EXPRESSIONS OF SOCIAL POWER
VOLKER HEYD AND KATHARINE WALKER
INTRODUCTION
METALS have certain distinctive properties which seem to have appealed to European Neolithic and later communities: brilliance, magical transformations behind their creation, and potential for re-melting, re-casting, and re-modelling. They were also valued for their colours: gold for the sun high on the horizon, copper for the setting sun or the blood of life, and silver for the moon. In the formative years of metallurgy, copper and its ores appear to have held primarily aesthetic roles as cosmetic colours, beads, and other personal adornments. They are likely to have been recognized as rare and precious, and were later mobilized in social differentiation. The adoption of metals altered economies and social relations, and triggered craft specialization. The roots of social differentiation were already present in some Neolithic communities, yet the uneven distribution of metal ores, like certain types of stone already, became elements in long-distance exchange networks and eventually trade. This paper attempts to go beyond simplistic ideas of metals in social stratification: it presents a more complex picture, outlining similarities and differences geographically in the presence and role of metallurgy during an early, middle, and late Copper Age.
THE EARLIEST METALLURGY IN EUROPE: A NEAR EASTERN ORIGIN?
The origins of metals can be found in the zone from which farming and animal husbandry came: the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’ and adjacent Anatolia, the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of modern-day Turkey. Powdered copper was used for cosmetic purposes at several sites including Jericho in Palestine, Nehal Hermar in Jordan, and Hallan Çemi in Turkey. A copper-rich pigment, dioptase, a copper silicate, was used also on some of the earliest statuary at Ain Ghazal, Jordan (7200–5000 BC) (Rollefson et al. 1985; Rosenberg 1999; Cleland et al. 2004). The earliest actual copper object to be discussed in print is an almond-shaped pendant with two perforations from Shanidar Cave, northern Iraq, said to date to the earliest ninth millennium BC (Solecki 1969, 311–314; Matthews 2003) although its chronological attribution is doubtful. The first clear evidence for the use of native copper in the production of trinkets comes from around the transition of Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (c. 8500–7600 BC) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (c. 7600–6000 BC). Slightly later copper artefacts are also known from Iran (Stech 1999).
The objects appearing at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites of Çayönü Tepesi and Nevali Çori, both in Turkey some 100km north-west of Shanidar Cave, are made from hammered native copper (Yalçin 2000). More than 100 copper objects, mostly oval-shaped beads, but also pins, fish hooks, awls, and a reamer indicate a proficiency of craftsmanship existing as early as the eighth millennium BC. Çayönü Tepesi has revealed some of the earliest attempts at working native copper with heat, instead of cold-working it, suggesting that people may have ‘begun to sense the properties of metal as metal, rather than as some peculiar kind of stone’ (Özdoğan and Özdoğan 1999, 13; see also Maddin et al. 1999). At Aşikli Höyük in Turkey, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlement slightly later in date, beads made from heat-treated native copper were also found (Esin 1999). Nearly all of them came from in-house burials. Çatal Höyük is another Turkish site which yields copper artefacts from the seventh millennium BC (Mellaart 1967, 217–218, pl. 104; Cessford 2001), as well as beads dating to 6400 BC, originally identified as lead but later found to be galena, a lead sulphide ore, rather than metal (Sperl 1990).
It is the ‘reduction process’ achieved through the roasting of ore with charcoal, the addition of further heat, and finally casting which transforms ores into brilliant metals, and marks the beginning of metallurgy proper. This stage, not yet reached for the famous Can Hassan copper macehead, dated to c. 6000–5900 BC, must have developed in the centuries thereafter; by c. 5000–4900 BC it is finally realized as shown by the copper flat axes from Mersin-Yumuktepe, layer XVI (Yalçin 2000).
In Europe, there is considerable evidence that metalworking origin
s followed the same general pathway, albeit with a later chronology. So, the earliest discoveries of hammered native copper from Moldavia (Markevich 1974, 14), Romania (Comşa 1991), Hungary (Kalicz 1992; Zalai-Gaál 1996), and Slovakia (Nemejčová-Pavuková 1995) date from the later sixth millennium BC. There are also late Hamangia copper objects of adornment (Pernicka et al. 1997) and early copper chisels from Maritza-period contexts (first quarter of fifth millennium BC) at Catalka (Todorova 1981, 53) and Drama (Moesta 1991) in Bulgaria. These are still hammered, with heat applied at least for the Drama chisel. The step towards metallurgy proper, and casting of heavy tools, seems then to have happened at the transition from the first to the second quarter of the fifth millennium BC. However, recent analyses from the Vinča site of Belovode, Serbia, perhaps indicate a much earlier date for the start of processing ores and casting at least smaller objects in Europe (Ernst Pernicka, pers. comm.; Radivojević et al. 2010). This implies that the Near East and Europe may have developed similar technological steps simultaneously, or one not long after the other, but it is probable they would have done this independently as has long been suspected.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF METALLURGY IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE