For the first time in human experience, a substance could be melted and converted into something new.
If you set off by car from the Volga River to Hungary, you will have to drive for 32 hours and cover a distance of about 2,500km. A man undertook this journey 6,500 years ago, and it would have taken him much longer. With isotopes and DNA, we can now track such journeys, and what comes home to me is the remarkable mobility of prehistoric individuals. Last year, I wrote about humanity’s interest in brightly coloured red ochre, and, since then, I have been researching other colours: the green and blue of copper ores. My exploration of the origins and spread of copper base metallurgy has been stimulated by my discoveries at Ban Non Wat, where, just as the first copper axes and ornaments reached the site in about 1050 BC, there was a rapid but temporary surge in the wealth of all mortuary offerings. We even find infants interred with thousands of shell beads, dazzling pottery vessels, and copper axes. Adults wore exotic marble and shell beads and bangles, copper base anklets and bells, and were accompanied by their axes, chisels, and awls. For three or four generations, these aggrandisers seem to have secured privileged access to valued prestige objects before the next stage, when bronzes were no longer found in graves and uniformity prevailed. I am interested in the impact, if any, of copper base metallurgy on the social lives of those who initially encountered this remarkable substance that, for the first time in human experience, could be melted and converted into something new.
So I started in Anatolia, with its combination of abundant sources of copper ore and the innovative prehistoric communities that constructed Gobekli and Karahan Tepe, began cultivating wheat and barley, and domesticated sheep and goats. Hallan «emi is a small hunter-gatherer settlement located in the upper reaches of the River Tigris. Occupied for a few centuries from 9700 BC, its occupants had access to a range of habitats that sustained broad-spectrum gathering and hunting. The interior layout of the site included a central space for communal feasting, but there were also sunken buildings that contained copper ore, exotic to the vicinity and obtained through exchange. The copper ore was probably prized for use as a decorative pigment.
