“Real Copper Age” or from the old paradigm to the new (part of 3)

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In the past, the material of a new series of articles on metallurgy * and the culture of the Bronze Age - "The first metal products and ancient cities: Chatal-Hüyuk -" the city under the hood "(part of 2) https://topwar.ru/96998-pervye-metallicheskie-izdeliya -i-drevnie-goroda-chatal-hyuyuk-gorod-pod-kolpakom-chast-2.html »it was about the ancient city in modern Turkey Chatal-Hyuk and traces of the oldest metallurgy of the planet discovered there. Today we are continuing this topic, which has so interested many VO readers. And the story goes a little differently from before. It will be a question not so much of concrete discoveries, as about questions of theory and ... our Russian priority in the study of the oldest bronze metallurgy of Eurasia.


Copper spearheads. Wisconsin, 3000 - 1000 BC. Historical Wisconsin Museum, USA.

From the old paradigm to the new

It has always been and will be that periodically there are people who are somewhat ahead of their views of others. That is, some kind of inspiration descends on them, or, which happens much more often, they work hard all their lives, and as a result they come to conclusions based on the results of their many years of research. In our country, such a researcher of the history of ancient metallurgy was Evgeny Chernykh, Russian archaeologist, head of the laboratory of natural sciences at the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, doctor of historical sciences, professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences ** and author of many significant works on this subject [1 ]. The most important thing, however, from all that he did while studying ancient metallurgy was a change in the whole paradigm, that is, a set of scientific data or axioms related to the history of its occurrence. The original paradigm was based on the theory of monocentrism, that is, the opinion that the origin of metallurgy took place in one place. Accordingly, population migrations were declared the most important mechanism for the spread of innovation. The dominant position in it was occupied by the principle of development “from simple to complex” on the basis of morphological and typological analysis of ancient artifacts and the construction of systems of relative chronology. Well, and, of course, the "triad of centuries" - stone, bronze and iron was the fundamental basis in this paradigm. In 1972, E.N. Chernykh argued that the question of how metallurgy originated and spread among the Old World population was still open.


Rough copper axes. The same period, culture, museum.

But time passed, and what does he offer now? Now a new paradigm is proposed: unconditional polycentrism in the development of metallurgical ancient cultures; explosive and often “ragged”, spasmodic rhythm of the spread of new technologies; in which the observance of the principle “from simple to complex” did not always happen. Often manifested themselves and regress, and even failures in the "climb to the heights of skill." As for the “Thomsen's triad,” it is associated only with the main, but by no means all of the Eurasian cultural communities, let alone other territories.

“Real Copper Age” or from the old paradigm to the new (part of 3)

Copper items from the Wisconsin State Museum are typical products of the American “copper age”.

Much of it, in general, was evident earlier. So, for example, it is quite clear that the processing of metal in ancient China arose out of touch with the metallurgical cultures of Asia and Europe, and was explosive in nature, that is, there were at least two centers for the emergence of metallurgy in Eurasia. Moreover, it is only in Eurasia. Because in the territory of the New World there were their centers of origin of metallurgy and their metallurgical cultures, and in many respects different from the Eurasian ones.


Indians "yellow knives".

Yes, but in what sequence did people in antiquity seize metal? Are there any generalizing schemes of the processes of the onset of metallurgy or are scientists limited to a simple statement of the presence of a treated metal or an equally simple dichotomy - there is no metal yet, the metal is already there! Of course, there are such schemes, and there are quite a few of them, but perhaps the most optimal are two of them, the first of which belongs to the Dutch scientist Robert James Forbes, and the second to the English historian of metallurgy Herbert Henry Coglen.

Metal in four stages

Both of them created their own schemes for the distribution of metal on the planet, based on archeological data and ... on their own logic, since it was precisely archaeological data that was not enough to substantiate a number of their statements. Let's start with the first scheme of R. Forbes, consisting of four stages.
I - stage - the use of native metal, as a stone;
II - stage - the stage of the native metal, like a metal. Native copper, gold, silver is used, and meteoric iron is processed by forging;
III - the stage of obtaining metal from ore: copper, lead, silver, gold, antimony; copper alloys, tin bronze, brass;
IV - the stage of iron metallurgy.

The scheme is quite logical and consistent, but it has a very general character, and this is where its dignity, and at the same time, its disadvantage. In addition, R. Forbes didn’t have many reasons for substantiating the first two stages. More successful and evidence E.N. Chernykh considers the scheme of Herbert Henry Coglen - the famous English historian of metallurgy.
A - cold, and then hot forging native copper, taken as a type of stone;
B - the melting of native copper and the use of simple open-top molds for casting;
C - smelting of pure copper from ore - the beginning of true metallurgy;
D - the appearance of the first bronze - artificial copper-based alloys.

What does this scheme mean? First of all, that in the period of the Eneolithic or the copper-stone age (phases A, B, C), significant advances were made in the technology of working with metal. In essence, the foundation has been laid for all future metallurgy as a whole, whereas the Bronze Age proper became only the development of the basic, previously mastered by man, metal processing techniques.

Accordingly, considering the spread of metal on the planet as a whole, we can be sure that yes, indeed - all these phases of the development of copper and bronze metallurgy in the history of mankind were present, but ... had different meanings in different places. For example, forging native copper has never played such a big role as ... in North America, in the Great Lakes region, where there were so rich deposits of copper that they were used from ancient times to the twentieth century!


In the USA, for example, the mounds of the so-called Etova-Mounds culture were found in the USA. It is proved that this area was inhabited around 1000 — 1550 n. er Indians of the Mississippi culture, which had a fairly high level of metal processing technology. This is evidenced by the numerous tools and weapon from copper, and also the plates decorated with stamping ornament and images. When the copper products in the burials protected the fabric from the impact of the earth, archaeologists found brightly colored fabrics decorated with patterns under them.

In the photo you see the layout of the settlement Etova-Mounds. These were fortified villages, in many respects identical with similar and even later European cultures. However, its inhabitants knew only one metal - native copper!

Therefore, when we say “copper age”, thus distinguishing it from the “Bronze Age” and the “Copper-Stone”, this “age” in the history of mankind was indeed, but ... was no more than a local culture of the North American continent, and many Indian tribes in the prairies, and in the South, and in the North practically did not use copper products, while others even got their name from the products made from native copper, for example, the tribes of "yellow knives" - tatsanotiny, Chiphevayan, helmet, glory and beaver.


Funerary statuettes of the Etova-Maundnz culture. It should be noted that there were many similar cultures on the North American continent and in the Mississippi River basin.

Real copper age

That is, the “real copper age” was precisely in North America, and when precious metal hunters sailed after Columbus, it turned out that the local Indians did not know not only iron, but also bronze. Their main metal was native copper.


Copper bird. American Museum of Natural History, New York.

And so it was that in the central part of the North American continent and to the south of the Great Lakes, already in the distant past, there was one of the largest river systems in the world - the Mississippi River with its tributaries, which covered a huge territory. This river system served as a convenient “transport artery” already for the ancient inhabitants of these places, and it was here that the area of ​​a highly developed culture of hunters and gatherers developed, which received the name Woodland in science. Ceramics, the tradition of building burial mounds, also appeared here for the first time; the beginnings of agriculture began to take shape, but most importantly, copper products appeared. The epicenter of this culture was the area along the Mississippi and its tributaries - the Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers.


Mississippi culture. Suspension with a headdress. The collection of the National Museum of American Indians.

The main centers for processing native copper in the area have become the modern territories of the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan. Already in the V – III millennium BC, local craftsmen knew how to make tips for arrows and spears, knives and axes from copper. Subsequently, the Woodland culture was replaced by other cultures, for example, Adena and Hopewell, whose representatives created excellent copper ornaments and ritual-memorial “plaques”, exquisite decorative plates, and dishes from thin sheets of wrought copper. The original "money" in the form of copper plates and those already appeared among the Indians of the North-West, when the Europeans came to them at the beginning of the XVI century.


Ohio, Ross County. Samples of art culture Hopewell. OK. 200 -500 AD Exhibited at the Serpent Museum, Ohio.

However, be that as it may, no matter how beautiful the local Indians did not create, but they processed copper in the most primitive ways, they didn’t know such a technological method as melting! Copper was mined by them from pure ore veins in the form of nuggets, then they were flattened by blows of hammers, after which, having obtained sheets of necessary form from it, they cut out the necessary figures from them or engraved patterns using for this purpose incisors from bone or stone.

More recently, it was believed that the Indians of the North American continent did not know hot forging, although some researchers believed that the use of this method by local craftsmen was likely. Recent metallographic studies of a number of copper products showed that the hot forging technology of the Indians was still known. The sizes, shape and structure of the copper grains inside the extant products were analyzed, which led to the conclusion that they first upholstered the billet with a heavy hammer, after which they were put on 5-10 minutes on hot coals, causing the copper to soften and lose its fragility and repeat This operation as many times as they did not end up with a thin copper sheet.

However, in the very north of the continent, both Greenlanders and Eskimos also used copper nuggets to make nails, arrowheads, and other weapons, as well as tools without melting. About this, in particular, told the Scottish merchant and traveler, an agent of the Canadian North-Western (fur) company, Alexander MacKenzie, who visited these places at the end of the XVIII century and testified that native peoples along the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean had native copper well known, and they knew how to handle it. Moreover, they forged all their products in the cold with just one hammer.


A copper plate depicting the Falcon dancer found in the Etovsky kurgans.

It should be noted that the source of native copper for the inhabitants of the Mississippi Basin and for the Northerner Indians were its deposits from the Lake Superior region on the border of the modern United States and Canada. Here were the richest reserves of high-quality copper ore, although usually native copper in industrial quantities is extremely rare. In this regard, the copper ore in this area is unique. The ore-bearing area stretches for about five hundred kilometers along the shore of one of the largest lakes in the world. And if nuggets of gold, weighing kilograms per 10, can literally be counted on the fingers, then with respect to copper in North America, the giants of the giants are, one might say, just lucky. Here, on the Kyosinou Peninsula, nuggets weighing 500 tons were found, that is, only one such nugget could provide an entire Indian tribe with metal, and for quite a long period.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that by the time Europeans arrived at these places, the mine workings were already heavily consumed and even had time to grow over with forests. But they found traces of workings here, near which stone hammers, copper tools and charcoal were found, and this was a whole “mining region” with a length of more than two hundred kilometers.

Commercial copper mining in the Lake Superior region began with the 1845 year and continued through the 1968 year. During this time around 5,5 million tons of copper was mined. In 1968, these mines were mothballed. The remaining copper reserves are estimated at about 500 thousand tons. That is, it is obvious that ore has been mined here for thousands of years. When exactly it began - this is a question that is still debatable. It is believed that mining of native copper began here in about the 6th - 5th millenniums BC. But there is another point of view, in accordance with which this field has been developed several thousand years before the specified time, and the development was led by the legendary Atlanteans!


The blade of the knife, made entirely of copper. The Archaeological Museum of the Palazzo del Podesta. Bologna. Italy.

However, the Atlanteans are the Atlanteans, but nowhere else in the world are there so clear evidence that humanity had such a period in its development as the copper age. In other regions, products from native copper are so rarely found by archaeologists that it is not possible to isolate the time of their appearance in a separate period and to call it the “copper age”. In addition, because of their venerable age, these products are sometimes in such a deplorable state that it is simply impossible to carry out a correct analysis of their chemical composition based on them, not to mention determining which copper went to produce them - native or smelted from ores. Yes, and the dating of such artifacts are also often in great doubt. So it is North America that remains the only real place on the planet, where the “copper age” really existed in ancient times! A certain conventionality of this definition is due to the fact that here the use of stone tools also took place, as in the Eneolithic era in Eurasia. But there, the technology of cold forging quite quickly replaced the casting into open molds, while the North American Indians still continued to forge the bulk of their products until the arrival of Europeans from pieces of native copper, and they did not know how to smelt copper from the ore, and the metallurgy itself did not master ! And why this never happened is unknown!

For those who are interested in the works of E.N. Cherny, the following works of his can be offered for in-depth study:
• History of ancient metallurgy in Eastern Europe. M., 1966.
• Metal - man - time. M., 1972.
• Mining and metallurgy in ancient Bulgaria. Sofia, 1978.
• Ancient metallurgy of Northern Eurasia (the Seima-Turbino phenomenon) (together with SV Kuzminykh). M., 1989.
• Metallurgical provinces and radiocarbon chronology (together with LI Avilova and LB Orlovskaya). M., 2000.

* In the artistic form of how it all happened, that is, how a person became acquainted with the “new stone”, very clearly showed in his historical story “The Tale of Manco Smel — a hunter from the tribe of the Shore People” S.S. Pisarev.
** Kuzminykh S.V. "Copper Mountain Nugget": to the 80 anniversary of E.N. Chernykh // Russian archeology. 2016. No. 1. C. 149 - 155.

(To be continued)
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  1. +1
    9 August 2016 06: 28
    Thank. Interesting. That's just how it happens, looked at the submitted photo and ... belay Well this is Tymoshenko sitting on the left ... That's when you believe in the relocation of souls
  2. +3
    9 August 2016 07: 53
    Thank you Vyacheslav, it is extremely interesting and informative ... Comments about the "remake" will pour in ...
    1. Riv
      +3
      9 August 2016 08: 26
      The value of the remake, a modern replica, is precisely to show how the product looked right after its manufacture. That is, artificially aging it makes no sense. And forging a fake for sale - to whom to sell? The main buyer is museums, private collectors of such things can be counted on the fingers and they deal with a fairly narrow circle of restoration specialists and archaeologists. So it’s difficult to put a fake in the exposition.

      I once made a knife from damask steel in our tool kit. The drawing turned out to be very small (fine-grained steel with an admixture of nickel), visible only with a strong increase, but still cast damask steel, no doubt. It differs from the old damask even externally. Where with a knife to the museum? They will laugh.
  3. PKK
    0
    9 August 2016 22: 40
    This is not a simple topic that draws many other topics. For making bronze, you need tin, and for tin you had to sail to the British Isles.
    In addition, for smelting copper, you need wood as a fuel. This explains the disappearance of forests in Europe. There is an opinion that the iron crafts of that time rusted and disappeared, there were bronze and copper. Hence the primacy of bronze.

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