Chalcolithic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chalcolithic is the period in human prehistory when copper first entered the toolkit of stone-age cultures. Copper did not replace stone tools overnight. Stone tools remained the dominant instruments throughout this era. What changed was the introduction of a shiny, workable metal that would eventually set humanity on a path toward bronze, iron, and beyond.

  The period sits between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, but it did not arrive everywhere at the same time, and in some regions, such as Russia, it never clearly arrived at all. Its earliest traces appear at the site of Belovode, on Rudnik mountain in Serbia, where the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper smelting at high temperature has been found, dating to around 5,000 BC. How a technology born in that Balkan mountain spread, transformed, and was independently reinvented across four continents is the story this documentary will explore.

• 2. A Name With Many Faces

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  Ferenc Pulszky, a Hungarian scientist, first formally proposed the concept of a distinct Copper Age in the 1870s. Working from the significant number of large copper objects unearthed within the Carpathian Basin, he argued that the traditional three-part division of prehistoric time, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, needed a fourth category inserted between stone and bronze.

  John Evans pushed the idea further in 1881, recognizing that copper use routinely preceded bronze, and distinguishing between a transitional Copper Age and the Bronze Age proper. Evans chose not to present his Copper Age as a full fourth age but kept it separate from the customary tripartite system. Just three years later, in 1884, Gaetano Chierici renamed the period in Italian as the eneo-litica, meaning the bronze-stone transition.

  British scholars translated that Italian coinage into "Eneolithic," but around 1900 complaints arose that the term looked, to untrained eyes, like "e-neolithic" or "outside the Neolithic," which was clearly not the intention. Writers began substituting "Chalcolithic," drawn from the Greek words khalkos for copper and líthos for stone. Yet that word came with its own trap: it suggested yet another stone age, paradoxically associated with copper. Today all three names, Copper Age, Eneolithic, and Chalcolithic, are used interchangeably to mean the same thing Evans originally described.

• 3. The Oldest Copper Work

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  A copper axe found at Prokuplje, Serbia carries the oldest securely dated evidence of copper-making at roughly 5,500 BC, about 7,500 years ago. The discovery, made in June 2010, extended the known record of copper smelting by about 800 years. It also raised the possibility that copper smelting was not a single invention that spread outward from one source but was instead invented independently in separate parts of Asia and Europe.

  Lead may have come before copper. It can be extracted simply by heating galena, and possible evidence of early lead smelting includes a lead bead found on Level IX of Catal Huyuk in central Anatolia, another lead bead from the 4th level of Jarmo dated to the 7th millennium BCE, and a lead bracelet from level XII of Yarim Tepe I dated to the 6th millennium BC. Copper smelting is also documented at Yarim Tepe at roughly the same time, and even earlier work is recorded at Tell Maghzaliyah, a site that completely lacks pottery.

  Farther north, copper artifacts in northern Germany and Denmark date from between 4000 and 3300 BC, with most finds clustering between 3500 and 3300 BC. Research from Kiel determined that the copper in those Funnel Beaker group objects was mined in Serbian mines, tracing a long chain of exchange across Europe.

• 4. Stone Tools in a Copper Age

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  Analysis of six archaeological sites on the Tehran Plain in Iran revealed a marked downward trend in both the quality of raw materials and the aesthetic variation of stone tools as copper took hold. Fazeli and Coningham used these results as evidence that copper's arrival caused a loss of craft specialisation among lithic workers.

  The networks of exchange and specialised processing that had developed during the Neolithic seem to have collapsed by the Middle Chalcolithic, around 4500-3500 BC. In their place, household-based production using local materials took over. Stone tool craft, once a specialist trade relying on high-quality raw materials traded across regions, became a domestic activity.

  Knowledge of copper spread faster than the metal itself. Many European cultures that never adopted copper tools still carved stone axes in the shape of copper axes, complete with the molding lines that a cast-metal tool would carry. Otzi the Iceman, whose remains were found in the Otztal Alps in 1991 and dated to about 3300 BC, was buried with a Mondsee copper axe, a single object that illustrates how a metal tool could travel far from where it was made.

• 5. Copper Across Continents

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  In South Asia, the inhabitants of Mehrgarh in present-day Pakistan fashioned tools from local copper ore between 7000 and 3300 BC. At the Nausharo site in Balochistan, a pottery workshop active around 4,500 years ago, archaeologists excavated 12 blades and blade fragments ranging from 12 to 18 centimeters long. Experiments showed that these blades were made with a copper indenter and served as tools for trimming and shaping unfired pottery.

  In India, Chalcolithic culture took root in four distinct farming communities: Ahar or Banas, Kayatha, Malwa, and Jorwe. The Banas culture, active between 2000 and 1600 BC, produced ceramics painted in red, white, and black. The Kayatha culture, spanning 2450 to 1700 BC, used brown-painted designs. Malwa culture, running from 1900 to 1400 BC, favored profusely decorated pottery in red or black. The Jorwe culture, lasting from 1500 to 900 BC, made ceramics with a matte surface and black-on-red designs. All four shared painted pottery and copper use, but each maintained its own ceramic identity.

  In the Aïr Mountains of Niger, independent copper smelting developed between 3000 and 2500 BC. Those metallurgical traditions kept developing into 1500 BC and beyond. In the Americas, the Old Copper complex mined and fabricated copper as tools, weapons, and personal ornaments in the upper Great Lakes region, centered in what is now Michigan and Wisconsin, with artifacts from some sites dated as far back as 6500 BC.

• 6. Bronze Before Bronze Was Expected

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  A study published in the journal Antiquity in 2013 reported the discovery of a tin bronze foil from the Plocnik archaeological site in Serbia, dated to around 4,650 BC. Alongside it, 14 other artifacts from Bulgaria and Serbia dated to before 4,000 BC showed that early tin bronze was more widespread in this period than researchers had assumed.

  The implications were significant. These European tin bronze objects predate the first tin bronze alloys in the Near East by roughly 1,500 years. They suggest that the metallurgical developments of this period did not follow a single linear path from the Near East outward into Europe, but involved parallel and independent experimentation across wide distances.

  Arsenical copper or bronze, another early alloy, was produced at two ancient sites in eastern Turkey's Malatya Province, Norşuntepe and Degermentepe, around 4200 BC. According to Boscher in 2016, hearths, slag, ore, and pigment were recovered across both sites. The slag at Norşuntepe contains no arsenic, which means arsenic was not a natural contaminant but was added separately during the process, pointing to intentional alloying by the 4th millennium BC.