Evidence for early copper smelting in Belovode, a Vinča culture settlement in Eastern Serbia

In this thesis the author will discuss evidence for the earliest copper smelting in Europe, documented during excavations of Belovode, a Vinĉa culture site in Eastern Serbia. The remains of slags, malachite beads, ceramics with bone-ash lagging and ores associated with ancient mines found in the vicinity of the site, surface finding of a copper ingot, offer insight into the organization and technology of the exploitation of copper ores for jewellery and metal production, respectively, at the end of the 6th millennium BC; representing one of the earliest known cases for metal smelting in the Neolithic world. The microscopic and compositional analyses have revealed smelting activities carried out in Belovode throughout the occupational period. Furthermore, lead isotope and trace element analyses confirmed exploitation of several copper deposits in the vicinity, one of which is Rudna Glava, already confirmed as the Vinĉa culture mine. Overall, this study demonstrated the consistent copper production over 500 years of occupational period of Belovode, which involved specialized crafts at a time copper represented a crucial commodity. It has provided an insight into what was surely an advanced technology at the end of 6th millennium, clearly pointing at the necessity of revising modern understanding of the development of metallurgy in the Old World

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia

"The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia is a landmark study in the origins of metallurgy. The project aimed to trace the invention and innovation of metallurgy in the Balkans. It combined targeted excavations and surveys with extensive scientific analyses at two Neolithic-Chalcolithic copper production and consumption sites, Belovode and Pločnik, in Serbia. At Belovode, the project revealed chronologically and contextually secure evidence for copper smelting in the 49th century BC. This confirms the earlier interpretation of c. 7000-year-old metallurgy at the site, making it the earliest record of fully developed metallurgical activity in the world. However, far from being a rare and elite practice, metallurgy at both Belovode and Pločnik is demonstrated to have been a common and communal craft activity. This monograph reviews the pre-existing scholarship on early metallurgy in the Balkans. It subsequently presents detailed results from the excavations, surveys and scientific analyses conducted at Belovode and Pločnik. These are followed by new and up-to-date regional syntheses by leading specialists on the Neolithic-Chalcolithic material culture, technologies, settlement and subsistence practices in the Central Balkans. Finally, the monograph places the project results in the context of major debates surrounding early metallurgy in Eurasia before proposing a new agenda for global early metallurgy studies.

The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia

"The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia is a landmark study in the origins of metallurgy. The project aimed to trace the invention and innovation of metallurgy in the Balkans. It combined targeted excavations and surveys with extensive scientific analyses at two Neolithic-Chalcolithic copper production and consumption sites, Belovode and Pločnik, in Serbia. At Belovode, the project revealed chronologically and contextually secure evidence for copper smelting in the 49th century BC. This confirms the earlier interpretation of c. 7000-year-old metallurgy at the site, making it the earliest record of fully developed metallurgical activity in the world. However, far from being a rare and elite practice, metallurgy at both Belovode and Pločnik is demonstrated to have been a common and communal craft activity. This monograph reviews the pre-existing scholarship on early metallurgy in the Balkans. It subsequently presents detailed results from the excavations, surveys and scientific analyses conducted at Belovode and Pločnik. These are followed by new and up-to-date regional syntheses by leading specialists on the Neolithic-Chalcolithic material culture, technologies, settlement and subsistence practices in the Central Balkans. Finally, the monograph places the project results in the context of major debates surrounding early metallurgy in Eurasia before proposing a new agenda for global early metallurgy studies.

5,000 years old Egyptian iron beads made from hammered meteoritic iron

The earliest known iron artefacts are nine small beads securely dated to circa 3200 BC, from two burials in Gerzeh, northern Egypt. We show that these beads were made from meteoritic iron, and shaped by careful hammering the metal into thin sheets before rolling them into tubes. The study demonstrates the ability of neutron and X-ray methods to determine the nature of the material even after complete corrosion of the iron metal. The iron beads were strung into a necklace together with other exotic minerals such as lapis lazuli, gold and carnelian, revealing the status of meteoritic iron as a special material on a par with precious metal and gem stones. The results confirm that already in the fourth millennium BC metalworkers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, an iron–nickel alloy much harder and more brittle than the more commonly worked copper. This is of wider significance as it demonstrates that metalworkers had already nearly two millennia of experience to hot-work meteoritic iron when iron smelting was introduced. This knowledge was essential for the development of iron smelting, which produced metal in a solid state process and hence depended on this ability in order to replace copper and bronze as the main utilitarian metals

Origins and genetic legacy of prehistoric dogs

Dogs were the first domestic animal, but little is known about their population history and to what extent it was linked to humans. We sequenced 27 ancient dog genomes and found that all dogs share a common ancestry distinct from present-day wolves, with limited gene flow from wolves since domestication but substantial dog-to-wolf gene flow. By 11,000 years ago, at least five major ancestry lineages had diversified, demonstrating a deep genetic history of dogs during the Paleolithic. Coanalysis with human genomes reveals aspects of dog population history that mirror humans, including Levant-related ancestry in Africa and early agricultural Europe. Other aspects differ, including the impacts of steppe pastoralist expansions in West and East Eurasia and a near-complete turnover of Neolithic European dog ancestry

Early Balkan Metallurgy: Origins, Evolution and Society, 6200–3700 BC

This paper analyses and re-evaluates current explanations and interpretations of the origins, development and societal context of metallurgy in the Balkans (c. 6200–3700 BC). The early metallurgy in this region encompasses the production, distribution and consumption of copper, gold, tin bronze, lead and silver. The paper draws upon a wide range of existing archaeometallurgical and archaeological data, the diversity and depth of which make the Balkans one of the most intensively investigated of all early metallurgical heartlands across the world. We focus specifically on the ongoing debates relating to (1) the independent invention and innovation of different metals and metal production techniques; (2) the analysis and interpretation of early metallurgical production cores and peripheries, and their collapses; and (3) the relationships between metals, metallurgy and society. We argue that metal production in the Balkans throughout this period reflects changes in the organisation of communities and their patterns of cooperation, rather than being the fundamental basis for the emergence of elites in an increasingly hierarchical society

Copper minerals and archaeometallurgical materials from the Vinča culture sites of Belovode and Pločnik: Overview of the evidence and new data

The Vinča culture sites of Belovode and Pločnik have been attracting scholarly attention for decades now, due to numerous discoveries indicative of copper mineral and metal use in these settlements, which are confirmed as, currently, the earliest worldwide and very likely developed independently in Eurasia.1 The authors attempt to give an overview of already published data along with new results stemming from the recently completed doctoral research of the primary author.2 All materials related to copper mineral use and pyrometallurgical activities are presented through the concept of metallurgical chaîne opératoire, following the established sequence of operations,3 which is adjusted for this specific case study and divided into three categories: copper mineral processing, (s)melting debris, and the making and working of finished metal objects. The qualitative overview of available data is therefore focused mainly around the material side of the studied samples and provides an insight into the technological choices for making copper mineral ornaments and copper metal artefacts in the sites of Belovode and Pločnik. Accordingly, it provides a model for the understanding of similar material assemblages that occur in other Vinča culture sites, or beyond. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br.177012: Society, spiritual and material culture and communications in the prehistory and early history of the Balkans

To whom does Serbian archaeology belong? The case of Belovode and Pločnik

The long-standing archaeological research of the Serbian Vinča culture sites of Belovode and Plocnik has been strengthened with the joint collaborative work with the UCL Institute of Archaeology in the past 6 years. This collaboration yielded scientific demonstration of the world’s earliest copper smelting amongst the excavated materials, c. 7000 years old. In the six years since the first publication of this finding in 2010, a number of detailed analytical studies followed, together with another breakthrough discovery of the world’s earliest tin bronze artefact. This artefact was excavated in a secure context within a Vinča culture settlement feature at the site of Pločnik, which was radiocarbon dated to c. 4650 BC. On the basis of the early metallurgical results from Belovode, the UK Government funded a large international collaborative project from 2012-2015. This included Serbian, British and German teams all of whom brought substantial experience and cutting-edge technology to the study of the evolution of the earliest known metal-making in its 5th millennium BC Balkan cultural context. This project’s forthcoming publications, including a major monograph published by UCL Press, which will be free to download, promise to shed new light on the life of the first metal-making communities in Eurasia, and also outline integrated methodological approaches that will serve as a model for similar projects worldwide. The open, balanced and respectful research atmosphere within our core project team is currently being challenged by an unsubstantiated controversy. This controversy arises from accusations against the project team members by Duško Šljivar, a once an extremely supportive and prominent member of our team. Each of these accusations by Duško Šljivar is completely contradictory to his own previous documented work, and have therefore easily been refuted. The work by Duško Šljivar in question encompasses: two decades of excavations at the sites of Belovode and Pločnik; including single-authored and joint publications prior to 2012, including those with Miljana Radivojević and Julka Kuzmanović-Cvetković; and official field documentation, either signed off solely by him, or together with his co-excavator at the site of Pločnik, Julka Kuzmanović-Cvetković. The first accusation, published in 2014, saw Duško Šljivar deny, together with another colleague, the veracity of his original field journal notes on the context of the previously mentioned tin bronze foil, for which he received an immediate and successful rebuttal. In the second accusation, published in Starinar LXV/ 2015, Duško Šljivar continued with the same practice of denying his own official field journals and publications which he (co-) authored with a series of false accusations relating to the manipulation of the original data from the excavations of the sites of Belovode and Pločnik by Radivojević and Kuzmanović-Cvetković. In the third accusation, Šljivar argues that his copyright was infringed, and that field journals were used without permission. This is despite the fact that these accusations are legally and formally unsupported, and that he shared his data and materials during the course of a long collaboration and co-authorship on a number of articles with both Radivojević and Kuzmanović- Cvetković over the course of the last two decades. In other words, in order to validate his accusations and to seek to damage our untainted academic standings, Duško Šljivar has denied all his professional and academic achievements, research articles, field diaries and formal documents that he ever (co-) wrote and/or signed on the topic. He even goes as far as to exclude a landmark joint publication in an international peer-reviewed scientific journal (Radivojević et al. 2010) from his citation list in order to support his claim that a formal agreement on the joint publishing of Belovode metallurgy results has never been fulfilled. Šljivar also omitted the published rebuttal (Radivojević et al. 2014) to unsubstantiated claims on alleged manipulation of contextual data of the tin bronze foil from the Vinča culture site of Pločnik put forward in a joint article by him and another colleague (Šljivar and Borić 2014). In order to end this malicious debate, we present our rebuttal from 2014 and further elaborate upon it by showing the original quotes from the Pločnik field diary on the day that the tin bronze foil in question was found, and from the concluding remarks of the diary in question. We again clearly demonstrate that there has never been any doubt regarding the secure context of the tin bronze foil within the Vinča culture material, that the Vinča horizon is the only cultural occupation at the site of Pločnik and that no intrusion has ever been observed in the context of this find, not on the day of the discovery, not in the conclusions or the excavation field diary, and not in the first publication of the said find by Duško Šljivar. We have presented a detailed account of this particular case in order to show Šljivar’s contradictory and inconsistent account of the official fieldwork documentation that he co-authored. It would appear that either Šljivar made a false field diary entry regarding the context of the tin bronze foil on the day of its discovery in 2008, or he presented incorrect information in the later joint commentary. The former hypothesis that Šljivar made a false entry in the field diary in 2008 in order to potentially mislead later scholarship does not seem plausible, especially as the object of dispute was not identified as tin-bronze on the day of discovery, but merely as another copper object from Pločnik and therefore not nearly as important to early metallurgical scholarship. To underline further the absurdity of the situation in which we found ourselves with Šljivar, we should also mention Šljivar’s initial agreement to co-author the paper we published in Starinar XLIV/2014, from which he withdrew without offering any constructive comments, only to publicly publish his views as well as professional and personal insults directed towards us in Starinar XLV/2015. The situation where Šljivar had the opportunity to act in his best professional interest was while our article was still in preparation and he chose not to do it; this leads us to assume that professional interests were not his priority on this matter. Finally, Šljivar’s deceitful and erroneous claims were executed in a spiteful language that is unfit for a scholarly journal, and damages both his reputation and the decision of this journal to publish them. We further elaborate on these developments in the broader context of Serbian archaeology, quoting the legislation on the intellectual copyright of excavation directors over the archaeological materials that they have excavated. The current law on Cultural Monuments recognizes the exclusive rights of excavation directors to publish their research for the period of 12 months after the excavations ended. After this period, other interested parties in the field can access the materials and any related field documentation. This demonstrates, alongside previously mentioned scientific arguments, that we have worked with the Belovode and Pločnik materials in accordance with the valid legal regulations. We conclude that there is no formal support for the exclusive interpretation of lives of communities in the sites of Belovode and Pločnik c. 7000 years ago, and emphasise the value of our original scientific contribution as illuminating a particular economic activity of the inhabitants of these two prehistoric villages. Finally, we call for the reinforcement of existing procedures in Serbia so that our profession can prevent any future misconduct such as that exemplified in the attempt by Duško Šljivar

Secrets Of The Drava: Bronze Age Metalwork In Continental Croatia

The article presents a group of Bronze Age artefacts recovered from the Drava river wetlands in continental Croatia, examining their typological and chronological markers, and assessing the technological characteristics of the material through spectrometric and use‐wear analyses. We discuss the context of the finds, types of items retrieved and deposition locations, and how these fit into the patterns of European Bronze Age metal deposition practices. Compositional and metalwork use analyses indicate that most of the items were in use prior to their deposition and display solid metallurgical skill. Chronologically, typologically, compositionally, and conceptually, the items align with the depositional trends seen in the wider region and beyond

A Partial Prehistory of the Southwest Silk Road: Archaeometallurgical Networks along the Sub-Himalayan Corridor

Historical phenomena often have prehistoric precedents; with this paper we investigate the potential for archaeometallurgical analyses and networked data processing to elucidate the progenitors of the Southwest Silk Road in Mainland Southeast Asia and southern China. We present original microstructural, elemental and lead isotope data for 40 archaeological copper-base metal samples, mostly from the UNESCO-listed site of Halin, and lead isotope data for 24 geological copper-mineral samples, also from Myanmar. We combined these data with existing datasets (N = 98 total) and compared them to the 1000+ sample late prehistoric archaeometallurgical database available from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan. Lead isotope data, contextualized for alloy, find location and date, were interpreted manually for intra-site, inter-site and inter-regional consistency, which hint at significant multi-scalar connectivity from the late second millennium bc . To test this interpretation statistically, the archaeological lead isotope data were then processed using regionally adapted production-derived consistency parameters. Complex networks analysis using the Leiden community detection algorithm established groups of artefacts sharing lead isotopic consistency. Introducing the geographic component allowed for the identification of communities of sites with consistent assemblages. The four major communities were consistent with the manually interpreted exchange networks and suggest southern sections of the Southwest Silk Road were active in the late second millennium bc