by ILH Staff
The furnace used to process copper purchased from present-day Jordan may have been a local invention, but even if the technology was imported, Beersheba played an "important role in the global metal revolution," says Professor Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University.
Copper slag found at the Neveh Noy excavation | Photo: Anat Rasiuk, Israel Antiquities Authority
The research, which began in 2017 when the IAA conducted a salvation dig to save antiquities that were under threat, indicates that the site might have been the first in the world to use a furnace.
Archaeologist Talia Abulafia, who led the excavation for the IAA, said that it had turned up evidence of "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."
The Chalcolithic period (the word is made up of the Greek words for "copper" and "stone") is so named because although metalworking was already in evidence, the tools used were still made of stone. At the Neveh Noy site, an analysis of the isotopes of ore remnants in the furnace shards show that the raw ore was brought to the workshop from Wadi Faynan, located in present-day Jordan, more than 100 km. (62 miles) away.
The furnace may have been a local invention.
"At the first stage of humankind's copper production, crucibles rather than furnaces were used," said Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near East Civilizations at TAU.
Ben-Yosef noted that the Neveh Noy dig had unearned evidence that the technology was furnace-based, which raises the possibility that the furnace was invented in this region. Howeve, he noted, it might have been invented elsewhere.
Still, he explained, there is "no doubt" that ancient Beersheba 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."
"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," Ben-Yosef explained.
"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," Ben-Yosef said.
According to the researcher, the people who lived near the copper mines traded with members of the Ghassulian culture from Beersheba and sold them the ore, although they did not have the capability to process it themselves. Even among the Ghassulian settlements, copper was refined by experts in special workshops. Moreover, a chemical analysis of remnants indicates that every workshop had its own special "recipe," which it did not share with its competitors.
In addition to Ben-Yosef and Abulafia, partners in the study include Dana Ackerfeld and Omri Yagel of the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv University and Dr. Yael Abadi-Reiss, and Dmitry Yegorov of the Israel Antiquities Authority, as well as Dr. Yehudit Harlavan of the Geological Survey of Israel.
ILH Staff
Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/10/13/6500-year-old-copper-workshop-shows-ancient-beersheba-was-a-hub-for-cutting-edge-tech/
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