New map of the diffusion of the Copper Age in Europe

I have read that most early bronzes were arsenic bronze, and the bronze age was also an accidental find. I guess arsenic is a common containment found in most ores. I would guess that a form of bronze would be found beside the oldest cooper. I don't think that bronze was purposely made until much later.
 
I have read that most early bronzes were arsenic bronze, and the bronze age was also an accidental find. I guess arsenic is a common containment found in most ores. I would guess that a form of bronze would be found beside the oldest cooper. I don't think that bronze was purposely made until much later.

That's been the opinion so far, but read the article - it says otherwise. They found tin bronze in the Balkans that was deliberately smelted about 6500 years ago. That predates bronze production in Anatolia.
 
They were using stannite a copper-tin-iron ore. They were picking minerals based on color, not on any true known bronze making knowledge. The earliest tin-bronze samples had plenty of other contaminants. We don't see true bronze working until the early 3rd Millennium BC in Mesopotamia. We see the first pure copper artifacts with deliberately controlled tin amounts in the middle-east. The Vinca were using what natural minerals were available to produce copper artifacts and getting a whole range of different copper/bronze derivatives.
 
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I suspect that making bronze by accident as a result of smelting copper ore that already as tin in it is what lead to bronze production through the deliberate addition of tin. Just as copper smelting was probably discovered by accident by people wanting to use copper ores to colour pottery, the making of bronze could have happened by accident as a result of "impurities" in copper ore. But once you have a product like bronze, you want to make lots of it, so if your copper/tin alloy ore is limited, you figure out how to reproduce the results by mixing different ores together in the smelting process.
 
I have a very hard time believing that copper age metallurgy was spread into Europe by haplogroup J considering that there are zero examples of Neolithic or Copper age J found in Europe to date. It seems there are two possibilities, it originated in the Balkans and spread east along the coast of the Black Sea, or it originated in the Caucasuses and spread west along the southern coast of the black sea. Being adopted originally by more stationary cultures (Cucuteni-Tripyllian, Maykop) and ignored by the more nomadic ones (Yamna). The dates of the finds seem to imply a Balkan origin. I think the distribution of the finds also implies a Balkan origin, if it was a Caucasus origin we would likely see more of an eastward distribution rather than the sharp cut east of those areas.

If I were to put a haplogroup label on the spread I would say it was spread by pre-indo european R1b, spreading metallurgy westward from the Balkans as they moved towards Iberia. I would even go further as to say those that made it to Iberia adopted the proto-basque language and bell beaker culture of the indigenous Iberians and then spread it eastward. Bold statements I know :D

also, there is a really great map of the spread of metallurgy on wikipedia that I can't post here ... because I don't have 10 posts yet :/

upload (dot) wikimedia (dot) org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Metallurgical_diffusion.png
 
J2 still have a strong signature in Balkans and in Varna area where metallurgy probably originated. My top pick is J2 as main HG, although surely there were other farmer's haplogroups involved too. R1s the Indo Europeans are out of question during copper age in Europe, not until late copper perhaps.
I'm so looking forward sequencing Varna and Cucuteni DNA.
 
After looking at this publication
http://www.bergbaumuseum.de/index.p...m-download/item/stoellner-et-al-2010-georgien ,
I think the map's colouring of Georgia needs some review. There is a map of bronze-age mines in the Caucasus on p.3, the C-14 dates for several mines can be found on page 4. Copper mining in Abkhazia started before 3.500 BC, and in Svaneti and Racha (upper Rioni valley) before 2.000 BC. More than 20 prehistoric mines in north-western Georgia have been documented so far. Noteworthy is also mining of arsenic and antimony in Racha since the 3rd millennium. Both metals can replace tin in copper alloys (bronze).

For East Georgia and Azerbaijan see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kura-Araxes_culture (check the enclosed map)
In its earliest phase, metal was scant, but it would later display "a precocious metallurgical development which strongly influenced surrounding regions". They worked copper, arsenic, silver, gold, tin, and bronze.

Their metal goods were widely distributed, recorded in the Volga, Dnieper and Don-Donets systems in the north, into Syria and Palestine in the south, and west into Anatolia.

As such, there should not be any "grey area"" separating the Eurasian steppe from the Caucasus and/ or northern Anatolia. However, according to
http://kura-arax.tau.ac.il/system/files/Kohl.pdf
The new high dating of the Maikop culture essentially signifies that there is no chronological hiatus separating the collapse of the Chalcolithic Balkan centre of metallurgical production and the appearance of Maikop and the sudden explosion of Caucasian metallurgical production and use of arsenical copper/bronzes. More than forty calibrated radiocarbon dates on Maikop and related materials now support this high chronology; and the revised dating for the Maikop culture means that the earliest kurgans occur in the northwestern and southern Caucasus and precede by several centuries those of the Pit-Grave (Yamnaya) cultures of the western Eurasian steppes.
As such, the Caucasus should probably be several grades darker than the steppes.

Last month, a new paper "The Beginning of Metallurgy in the Southern Levant: A Late 6th Millennium CalBC Copper Awl from Tel Tsaf, Israel" has been published:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0092591
A recently discovered copper awl from a Middle Chalcolithic burial at Tel Tsaf, Jordan Valley, Israel, suggests that cast metal technology was introduced to the region as early as the late 6th millennium CalBC. This paper examines the chemical composition of this item and reviews its context. The results indicate that it was exported from a distant source, probably in the Caucasus. (...)

The earliest extractive metallurgy in the southern Levant is typically connected with the Late Chalcolithic period (ca. 4500–3800 CalBC) and reliable 14C dates show that the prestige items were manufactured as early as 4350–4250 CalBC [28]–[29]. In the southern Levant, an extremely elaborate tradition developed using lost-wax casting of combining copper ores with high antimony or nickel content with arsenic rich ores to cast prestige objects, as known at various sites in southern Israel [30]–[33]. (...) The elaboration of south Levantine Late Chalcolithic metallurgy means that with our current archaeological record, the peak of the technical evolution of copper metallurgy is set at its beginning. In our opinion, this suggests that large parts of the technological evolution of metallurgy have not yet been discovered. Indeed, the Tel Tsaf awl dated to ca. 5100–4600, centuries earlier, would thus fill an important gap in the picture. However, the high percentage of tin in the awl could be used to argue that the item was an intrusive object from a much later period—although during the excavation no disturbances were documented and the context was sealed by mudbricks and stone slabs and cobbles.

Recently, new data on very early copper artifacts in the northeastern Near East and the Balkans indicate that tin was found in some of the early metal items known in this area [35]–[37]. Another example comes from the Late Neolithic mound of Aruchlo I in Georgia, 5800–5300 CalBC [38]. This is a heavily corroded, small, ring-shaped bead, and therefore it is unclear whether it was cast or hammered. XRF-analysis identifies copper, iron, arsenic and a larger amount of tin. It was suggested that the object was made from a polymetallic raw-material, i.e. a natural copper-tin alloy [38]–[39]. A final analysis of the bead recently confirmed a copper-based (84.991%) alloy with high amounts of tin (8.350%) as well as arsenic (3.016%) and iron (3.643%) [40].

Even though it could be argued that the items from Aruchlo I and Tel Tsaf are later intrusions which were brought into earlier archaeological layers by post-depositional processes, this seems to be less plausible because there are no known later settlement traces at either site. Since artificial alloying would also be very improbable at such an early time, a natural copper-tin alloy is, at the moment, an interpretation worth considering. Copper sources with a natural tin-copper alloy are known inter alia in Mušiston, Tajikistan [41]–[42]. The easy availability of tin and the knowledge of natural tin-copper alloys could be one reason why the alloying of tin-bronze took place in the Caucasus significantly earlier than in neighboring regions, namely in the 4th millennium CalBC [43].

If one accepts the Aruchlo I bead as non-intrusive, it demonstrates the possibility of the extraction and use of natural tin-copper alloys as early as the 6th millennium CalBC. This, in turn, also opens the possibility that the item from Tel Tsaf was made from a natural tin-copper source and transported to the Jordan Valley via long-distance exchange networks, which also brought obsidian, groundstone items and other goods from Armenia, Anatolia and Syria through the Levantine Corridor.

Note that Aruchlo is in East Georgia, approximately 50 km south from Tbilissi, and thus within the region of the Kura-Araxes Culture and its obsidian-based predecessors. The Kura-Araxes culture did not include West Georgia (Colchis). This, however, does not mean the Western Caucasus had no metallurgical tradition. This paper by the British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/6a Append text-opt-sec.pdf states:
By the MBA of the northern Caucasus, the rich kurgan burials of the Maikop culture have declined and have been largely replaced by burials in pits or small cists. Chernykh (1992) sees two distinct foci, the Terek River in the east and the Kuban River in the west. (..)

The Late Bronze Age: mid-2nd to1st millennium BC

The LBA and Early Iron Age saw an increase in the metallurgical activity in these areas which to some extent was in decline towards the end of the MBA. Chernykh (1992) suggests this is associated with the growing exploitation of copper and polymetallic deposits associated with primary (sulfidic) copper minerals. He sees the deposits of the Little (or southern) Caucasus as the main focus for this new surge in mining activity. Pyritic copper mines have been identified in the main Caucasus range, and over a hundred are known from the Gornaya Racha region of Transcaucasia which also produced antimony and arsenical ores (Chernykh 1992: 276). Many of the objects in the British Museum’s collection are typical of LBA metal production. Perhaps underrepresented in the collection are the highly decorated incised axes with stylized zoomorphic designs. The typology of these and other tools are the basis for the division of the Caucasian metallurgical province into two regions: the
western Koban-Colchidic zone and the eastern Caucasian-Caspian zone.

As such, while ore mining and metallurgy may have commenced earlier in the Kura-Araxes zone, benefitting from established obsidian trade routes to the Levante, it should also have been present in the Western Caucasus by the beginning of the 4th millennium BC. Considering that, according to the Israeli paper cited above, copper-antimony alloys have been casted in the Levante since 4.500 BC, and the only known and exploitable Near East sources of Antimony are Armenia and Racha on the south-western slope of the Great Caucasus (source in link below), metallurgy, or at least antimony mining for export, in West Georgia has most likely already started in the 5th millennium BC.
http://books.google.de/books?id=C-T...CDgK#v=onepage&q=Chalcolithic Georgia&f=false
This on-going research project may tell us more: http://www.ritak-leibniz.de/tiki-index.php?page=anatolia

Further reading:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/dterms/qt/dzudzuana_cave.htm
http://www.academia.edu/4647062/Anc...esults_from_excavations_in_Western_Azerbaijan
http://www.ajaonline.org/sites/default/files/AJA1134Amzallag_0.pdf
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9017-3_22
http://www.archatlas.org/ObsidianRoutes/ObsidianRoutes.php
 
Metallurgical_diffusion.png


I can now post the map!
 
Metallurgical_diffusion.png


I can now post the map!

...which I already was aware of, and that is actually quite nice, except that it lacks a few mining sites that are important to understand cultural diffusion, especially:
  1. prehistoric cppper mines on Menorca - add in the old obsidian trade network around Sardinia and Lipari, and you start to understand how metallurgy made its way to southern Spain, plus the distribution of Y-DNA haplogroup I2a1a1
  2. (a) The tin and copper deposits in the Ergebirge ("ore mountains") and the Fichtelgebirge along the German-Czech border, plus
    (b) copper (+silver) in the Harz, and the Mansfeld copper deposits just east of the Harz.
    Both combined give you a clue on the "northward bay" metallurgy shows around the upper and middle Elbe (in that respect, maciamo's map is actually better than the Wikipedia one), the regional spread of the Unetice culture, the oppida network of central European Celts, the yDNA I2a2 distribution, etc.

Now that I can include links and pictures, I will post some more related to the above ..
 
Metalurgy in the Elbe-Saale (Harz) region

A recent paper (2012, in German) discusses a copper dagger that has been found in a late Neolithic grave from Aspenstedt near Halberstadt (15 km north of the Harz mountains), and uses the opportunity to, based on other finds in the region, reconstruct the early history of metallurgy in the area:
http://www.uni-kiel.de/ufg/bereiche/dateienJMueller/mueller_2012_pz.pdf


According to the paper, the process included the following stages:
  1. 4.100-3.800 BC : Occasional import of copper tools from western Slovakia (9 finds in total). The origin might be the place described in this paper: http://www.vfg.uni-wuerzburg.de/forschung/projekte/fidvar_near_vrable/
  2. 3.800-3.500 BC: Increased occurrence of copper artefacts (now also decorative items in addition to tools), and indication of local processing of imported copper. The supply source shifts towards East Alpine Mondsee copper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondsee_group). The Aspenstedt dagger, a Mondsee dagger that exhibits signs of local re-shaping, belongs into this group.
  3. 3.500- 3.350 BC: First indication of the use of local copper alongside imported one.
  4. 3.350 - 3.100 BC: Strong increase in copper finds (8% of all locations, compared to 4% before), mostly decorative items, increasingly produced from local copper.
  5. 3.100 - 2.800 BC: Further increase of copper finds (11% of all locations). The increased occurrence of copper axes, produced from local copper, indicates a well developed local tool making industry.

As a dagger similar to the Aspenstedt one has been found in Bygholm, Jutland, the paper also examines parallels to the metallurgical development in the Western Baltics / Southern Scandinavia. It concludes a similar, though slightly delayed development for the Western Baltics / southern Scandinavia until 3.350 BC. However, it is not clear whether southern Scandinavia already used local copper between 3.500 and 3.350. After 3.350, the south Scandinavian metallurgical tradition apparently breaks, to only reappear more than a millennium later in the Nordic Bronze age. Reasons for this break are not discussed in the paper.

In any case, the paper suggests that in both maciamo's map and the Wikipedia map posted by motzart, the Elbe-Saale-Harz region (possibly also the Western Baltics) needs to be coloured in a darker brown. The fact that by 3.800 BC Mondsee copper was already traded towards the Harz area suggests that metallurgy in Eastern / central Austria probably already started in the 5th millennium BC.
 
Reminder (and a little bit off-topic): copper/cuprum has Greek origin. It comes from the word Κύπρος/Cyprus. The maps above show that Cyprus was full of that metal.
 
Metallurgical_diffusion.png


I can now post the map!

The map has at least one major inaccuracy. Tin was mined in Cornwall in Britain over 4000 years ago. The map shows copper mines in Britain but not its famous tin mines.
 
The map has at least one major inaccuracy. Tin was mined in Cornwall in Britain over 4000 years ago. The map shows copper mines in Britain but not its famous tin mines.

I saw that map in Wikipedia.
 
The map has at least one major inaccuracy. Tin was mined in Cornwall in Britain over 4000 years ago. The map shows copper mines in Britain but not its famous tin mines.

You're right. I don't think it's totally accurate. It's also missing mines in Italy, including the famous copper mine in Liguria.
 
You're right. I don't think it's totally accurate. It's also missing mines in Italy, including the famous copper mine in Liguria.

There also seems to be a problem with the direction some of those arrows are going. The map shows an going from Denmark along the north coast of Europe and across to Britain. However, the British Copper Age started about 4500 years ago and lasted for about 350-400 years until the Bronze Age started in Britain, whereas Demark seems to have gone directly from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age starting about 3700 years ago, long after Britain became an important source of tin and a place were bronze tools were used. And interestingly enough, a recent analysis of the copper used to make the earliest bronze tools in Demark seems to have come from Iberia, which would seem to suggest that there weren't trade routes connecting Britain and Demark back then. The paper, by Ling et al, is entitled "Moving metals; provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotope and elemental analysis". It was published in the January 2014 edition of the Journal of Archeological Science (pages 105-132). And I'm wondering whether that arrow going from central Europe to Italy is accurate, given the 4800 year old Bell Beaker site in northwestern Italy, along the coast.
 
Well, the arrows indicate the amber routes, that is the countertrade in exchange for copper/ tin / bronze. Actually, the "Moving metals" paper includes better and more detailed maps on the trade flows, though it deals with central Sweden and not with Denmark, and their earliest bronze tools were made from Tyrolean, not Iberian copper....
I intend to post details about it in my new "Bronze age trade networks" thread, once I have managed to extract the maps from that paper.
 
Well, the arrows indicate the amber routes, that is the countertrade in exchange for copper/ tin / bronze. Actually, the "Moving metals" paper includes better and more detailed maps on the trade flows, though it deals with central Sweden and not with Denmark, and their earliest bronze tools were made from Tyrolean, not Iberian copper....
I intend to post details about it in my new "Bronze age trade networks" thread, once I have managed to extract the maps from that paper.

I don't read German, so can't comment on the paper that you're referring to. However, I think it's highly unlikely that any trade route connecting central Sweden to western Europe would exclude Denmark, and the arrows do seem to show a trade route from Denmark into Germany. But I'd be interested in reading what the authors of that paper have to say, including what evidence they have that contradicts the metal analysis of the paper I referred to. The problem with your map is that it lacks dates for when trade routes commenced, so it's difficult to assess how meaningful those arrows are. Everything I've read about the archeology of Europe suggests that there were trade routes along the Atlantic between Iberia and Britain long before metal came into use in Scandinavia, which happened rather late. I'll admit I'm surprised that metal analysis would show that Danish people were initially using copper from Iberia and not local copper or copper from Britain or the Hartz Mountains. If the Danes were originally using Iberian copper, that would suggest a controlling Iberian elite dominated metal trade along the Atlantic and North Sea at the beginning of the Bronze Age in Scandinavia. But if you have other evidence, I'd be interested in reading it in English, if possible, with relevant dates provided. I have difficulty in interpreting your colour coded timeline.
 
Sorry, I didn't provide the citations for the mines in Italy...

Mid fourth-millennium copper mining in Liguria, North-west Italy: the earliest known copper mines in western Europe.
Roberto Maggi and Mark Pierce
http://beniculturali.altaviadeimont...rces/cms/documents/MaggiPearceAntiquityML.pdf

Early Metallurgy in the Central Mediterranean, Andrea Delfino, 2014
http://www.academia.edu/5926123/Dol...Global_Perspective_473-506._New_York_Springer

Some Aspects of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Metallalurgy in Liguria, Davide Delfino
http://mgu.bg/geoarchmin/naterials/46Delfino.pdf







 
Sorry, I never provided the citations for the early copper age mines in Italy...

Roberto Maggi and Mark Pearce, Mid-fourth millennium copper mining in Liguria, north-west Italy: the earliest known copper mines in western Europe.
http://beniculturali.altaviadeimont...rces/cms/documents/MaggiPearceAntiquityML.pdf

Dolfini, Early Metallurgy in the Central Mediterranean, http://www.academia.edu/5926123/Dol...Global_Perspective_473-506._New_York_Springer

Thanks, Angela. I found the second article to be particularly informative and interesting. However, despite the comments in that paper about shepherd warriors from the Balkans subjugating the Italian population, I think the use of copper weaponry, while it obviously occurred, is not quite such an advance over stone weapons as bronze was to be, and that smelted copper tools probably had more of an impact in giving Copper Age people an advantage over Stone Age people. And the Copper Age people lacked other technology that would make conquest easy (such as the horse and chariot) so I personally suspect that any "conquest" was in the form of traders and copper makers being allowed to settle peacefully among Stone Age people, then outcompeting them or integrating with them, whereas later Bronze Age warriors with chariots would have had much more of a military advantage. But I suppose further archeology and DNA testing will eventually tell us if my suppositions are valid.

It's too bad the paper didn't address the issue of glazed pottery in the context of copper smelting, since I'm convinced that copper smelting is easily discovered by anyone who tries to use copper ores to colour glazed pottery, and glazed pottery also provides the equipment necessary for copper smelting. That raises the possibility or probability that copper smelting could have been invented separately in several places, whereas something like the deliberate production of bronze tools with a specific percentage of another metal present requires much more specialized knowledge, so may have been more dependent on diffusion for its spread.
 

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