TECHNOLOGY
Belovode: the First Copper Smelting
~6,900 years ago
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian
At Belovode, in Serbia, copper was being smelted from ore about 6,900 years ago, the oldest known evidence of copper smelting.
Belovode, a site of the Vinca culture in eastern Serbia, has yielded the oldest known evidence of copper smelting, dated to about 6,900 years, in a context of farming villages and not in the Near Eastern area to which the invention was traditionally attributed. Ores were selected there by colour, systematically associating black and green rocks, a choice maintained over several centuries. The neighbouring site of Plocnik has produced a fragment of tin bronze dated to about 6,500 years. The metallurgical remains are distributed through the settlement and not concentrated in a reserved area, which indicates a common activity rather than restricted knowledge.
Why it matters
The reduction of ore constitutes the first transformation rendering a raw material unrecognisable, and the process deserves description, heat alone not sufficing. Copper is there combined with oxygen; charcoal burning in an air-poor atmosphere gives off a gas that captures that oxygen and frees the metal. The operation therefore requires a confined hearth rather than a vigorous fire, which also explains the selection of green and black ores, in which copper occurs as oxides and carbonates. Every age of metals rests on this process, and the Balkan data reopen the hypothesis of an invention occurring at several points.
Dating & uncertainty
The Belovode excavations provide chronologically and contextually secure evidence of copper reduction in the forty-ninth century BCE, the oldest fully constituted metallurgy known. The tin bronze foil from Plocnik, dated to about 6,500 years, moves the first attestations of bronze back by about 1,500 years. Their location, far from the Near East, contradicts the model of a Eurasian metallurgy issuing from a single centre.
Our species’ history as one day
23:28:2731 min 33 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day