Technology · c. 5000–4500 BCE
Copper smelting begins
Belovode, near Petrovac na Mlavi (eastern Serbia)
At Belovode, a village of the Vinča culture in the Balkans, copper slag dated to about 5000 BCE is the oldest securely dated evidence of smelting copper from ore at high temperature. Within a few centuries metal was spreading across south-eastern Europe: the cemetery at Varna on the Black Sea coast (c.
4600–4300 BCE) held copper tools and some 3,000 gold objects, often called the oldest gold treasure in the world.
Why it mattered
Smelting turned rock into tools, ornaments and portable wealth, opening the Copper Age, and rich graves like those at Varna show metal sharpening the divide between elites and everyone else.
Elsewhere
Early copper-working is also documented in the Near East, and around the North American Great Lakes people of the Old Copper complex cold-hammered native copper from about 6500 BCE, though without smelting it.
Related
- The world in 3000 BCE: The First Kings chapter
- Çatalhöyük, an early proto-city previous moment · c. 7500–5600 BCE
- The wheel and the plough next moment · c. 3500 BCE