The first copper smelting and the dawn of the Chalcolithic
- Date
- c. 5000 – 4600 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Southeastern Europe (Balkans)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
The deliberate smelting of metal from ore, as opposed to merely hammering naturally occurring native copper, marks one of humanity's most consequential technological thresholds.
Some of the earliest secure evidence comes from Vinča-culture sites in the central Balkans, where excavations at Belovode and Pločnik in Serbia revealed copper smelting around the 49th century BCE (c. 4800 BCE), within a broader range of roughly 5400–4400 BCE. Far from being a rare elite art, metallurgy here appears to have been a fairly common communal craft, building directly on the high-temperature skills developed in pottery kilns. The mastery of fire chemistry to extract and cast metal opened the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, the transitional era between Stone and Bronze Ages, and set in motion a long trajectory toward metal tools, weapons, ornaments and the wealth-based social hierarchies that metal goods helped to express. Comparable early metallurgical activity is known from the Near East and southeastern Europe, reflecting more than one focus of innovation.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Development of large-scale irrigation agriculture in southern Mesopotamiac. 5300–4100 BCE
- Gunditjmara Build the Budj Bim Eel Aquaculture Systemc. 4600 BCE
- The ard plough and the Secondary Products Revolutionc. 4500–3500 BCE
- Domestication of sorghum and pearl millet in the African Sahelc. 4000–2500 BCE
- First canal irrigation at Choga Mami and the Samarra culturec. 6000 BCE
- Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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