6,500-year-old copper workshop uncovered in the Negev Desert's Beer
Sheva
Copper-producing tech was likely a closely guarded secret

Date:
October 5, 2020
Source:
American Friends of Tel Aviv University
Summary:
A new study indicates that a workshop for smelting copper ore once
operated in the Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva, the capital
of the Negev Desert. The new study also shows that the site may
have made the first use in the world of a revolutionary apparatus:
the furnace.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A new study by Tel Aviv University and the Israel Antiquities Authority indicates that a workshop for smelting copper ore once operated in the
Neveh Noy neighborhood of Beer Sheva, the capital of the Negev Desert. The study, conducted over several years, began in 2017 in Beer Sheva when
the workshop was first uncovered during an Israel Antiquities Authority emergency archeological excavation to safeguard threatened antiquities.


==========================================================================
The new study also shows that the site may have made the first use in
the world of a revolutionary apparatus: the furnace.

The study was conducted by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, Dana Ackerfeld, and
Omri Yagel of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archeology and Ancient
Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv University, in conjunction with
Dr. Yael Abadi-Reiss, Talia Abulafia, and Dmitry Yegorov of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Dr.

Yehudit Harlavan of the Geological Survey of Israel. The results of the
study were published online on September 25, 2020, in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

According to Ms. Abulafia, Director of the excavation on behalf of
the Israel Antiquities Authority, "The excavation revealed evidence
for domestic production from the Chalcolithic period, about 6,500
years ago. The surprising finds include a small workshop for smelting
copper with shards of a furnace - - a small installation made of tin
in which copper ore was smelted -- as well as a lot of copper slag."
Although metalworking was already in evidence in the the Chalcolithic
period, the tools used were still made of stone. (The word "chalcolithic" itself is a combination of the Greek words for "copper" and "stone.") An analysis of the isotopes of ore remnants in the furnace shards show that
the raw ore was brought to Neveh Noy neighborhood from Wadi Faynan,
located in present-day Jordan, a distance of more than 100 kilometers
from Beer Sheva.

During the Chalcolithic period, when copper was first refined, the
process was made far from the mines, unlike the prevalent historical
model by which furnaces were built near the mines for both practical
and economic reasons. The scientists hypothesize that the reason was
the preservation of the technological secret.



========================================================================== "It's important to understand that the refining of copper was the
high-tech of that period. There was no technology more sophisticated than
that in the whole of the ancient world," Prof. Ben-Yosef says. "Tossing
lumps of ore into a fire will get you nowhere. You need certain
knowledge for building special furnaces that can reach very high
temperatures while maintaining low levels of oxygen." Prof. Ben-Yosef
notes that the archeology of the land of Israel shows evidence of the Ghassulian culture. The culture was named for Tulayla^t al-Ghassu^l, the archeological site in Jordan where the culture was first identified. This culture, which spanned the region from the Beer Sheva Valley to
present-day southern Lebanon, was unusual for its artistic achievements
and ritual objects, as evidenced by the copper objects discovered at
Nahal Mishmar and now on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

According to Prof. Ben-Yosef, the people who lived in the area of the
copper mines traded with members of the Ghassulian culture from Beer
Sheva and sold them the ore, but they were themselves incapable of
reproducing the technology.

Even among the Ghassulian settlements along Wadi Beer Sheva, copper was
refined by experts in special workshops. A chemical analysis of remnants indicates that every workshop had its own special "recipe" which it
did not share with its competitors. It would seem that, in that period,
Wadi Beer Sheva was filled with water year-round, making the location convenient for smelting copper where the furnaces and other apparatus
were made of clay.

Prof. Ben-Yosef further notes that, even within Chalcolithic settlements
that possessed both stone and copper implements, the secret of the
gleaming metal was held by the very few members of an elite. "At the
beginning of the metallurgical revolution, the secret of metalworking
was kept by guilds of experts. All over the world, we see metalworkers' quarters within Chalcolithic settlements, like the neighborhood we found
in Beer Sheva." The study discusses the question of the extent to which
this society was hierarchical or socially stratified, as society was
not yet urbanized. The scientists feel that the findings from Neveh Noy strengthen the hypothesis of social stratification. Society seems to have consisted of a clearly defined elite possessing expertise and professional secrets, which preserved its power by being the exclusive source for the
shiny copper. The copper objects were not made to be used, instead serving
some ritual purpose and thus possessing symbolic value. The copper axe,
for example, wasn't used as an axe. It was an artistic and/or cultic
object modeled along the lines of a stone axe. The copper objects were
probably used in rituals while the everyday objects in use continued to
be of stone.

"At the first stage of humankind's copper production, crucibles rather
than furnaces were used," says Prof. Ben-Yosef. "This small pottery
vessel, which looks like a flower pot, is made of clay. It was a type
of charcoal-based mobile furnace. Here, at the Neveh Noy workshop that
the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered, we show that the technology
was based on real furnaces.

This provides very early evidence for the use of furnaces in metallurgy
and it raises the possibility that the furnace was invented in this
region.

"It's also possible that the furnace was invented elsewhere, directly from crucible-based metallurgy, because some scientists view early furnaces
as no more than large crucibles buried in the ground," Prof. Ben-Yosef continues.

"The debate will only be settled by future discoveries, but there is no
doubt that ancient Beer Sheva played an important role in advancing the
global metal revolution and that in the fifth millennium BCE the city
was a technological powerhouse for this whole region."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
American_Friends_of_Tel_Aviv_University. Note: Content may be edited
for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Dana Ackerfeld, Yael Abadi-Reiss, Omri Yagel, Yehudit Harlavan,
Talia
Abulafia, Dmitry Yegorov, Erez Ben-Yosef. Firing up the furnace:
New insights on metallurgical practices in the Chalcolithic Southern
Levant from a recently discovered copper-smelting workshop at Horvat
Beter (Israel). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2020;
33: 102578 DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102578 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112119.htm

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