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Ancient Europe: The Copper Age [1]

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Date: 2023-03-12  

In Europe, the Copper Age began between 5000 BCE and 4000 BCE with copper-using cultures in the Balkans being among the first to use this metal for making tools. In his book Exploring Prehistoric Europe, Chris Scarre reports:

“We don’t know how they discovered that copper-bearing rocks could be made to yield up their metal if processed in the right way. But by 4500 B.C. they were already making tools and ornaments of copper, and driving mines deep into copper-bearing deposits in quest of the valuable metal.”

It should be noted that as people began using copper tools, they also continued using stone tools. The use of both copper and stone tools continued throughout the Copper Age.

Initially, the making and use of copper tools seems to have been isolated in the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin. Thus, the European Copper Age is divided into two parts: an earlier phase when the use of copper was isolated, and a later phase when copper spread throughout Europe. This means that different parts of Europe entered the Copper Age at different times, with Britain and Ireland being the last areas to which copper diffused.

In making copper tools, the copper ore must be exposed to high heat. Because of this, it has been speculated that the process of controlling the heat for smelting the copper may have come from the knowledge and skills required for making pottery, which also requires high heat.

To make a copper tool such as an axe, a chisel, or a dagger, the molten copper is poured into a mold. In her book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, Jean Manco writes:

“Once a mould was created, it could be filled with molten copper over and over again. Given the difficulty of acquiring the technology, it is likely that knowledge of copper-working was passed from master to apprentice.”

This illustration was in a display in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. It shows the use of an open stone mold for making copper tools.

Making copper tools—mining the ore, smelting it, and fashioning a variety of tools and other artifacts—required not only skill but also knowledge and time. As a result, making copper artifacts was not something that most people could do, so some skilled people devoted all their time to it. In their book The Origins of Britain, Lloyd and Jennifer Laing report:

“Any farmer with some practice could probably have produced a stone tool, but without the technical know-how no man of the fields would have been able to make an adequate copper axe. The need for specialized knowledge must have led to new, exciting career prospects for aspiring youth—the craft of the smith had been discovered.”

These full-time specialists could not devote much to obtaining food—to farming, herding, and hunting. In an article in Archaeology, Andrew Curry writes:

“With some villagers spending all their time doing one thing—a metalworker, for example, would have to spend all his time producing copper—elaborate social structures must have developed to ensure the settlement’s specialists were fed and clothed.”

The new Copper Age social structures were hierarchical, meaning that there were differences in the access of material resources. In modern terminology, there were social classes and the upper classes had more and different things. Chris Scarre puts it this way:

“Copper tools and ornaments were the fashion accessories of the rich and powerful, a visible sign that some sections of the community were more important than others.”

Status distinctions are evident in grave goods: high status individuals were buried with more artifacts, particularly copper artifacts.

The most famous European Copper Age person is, of course, Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old frozen mummy found in the Alps by German hikers in 1991. Ötzi has been the focus of many documentaries, books, and articles. While his body has told us a lot about life in the Copper Age, it was his copper axe, still hafted to a wooden handle, that placed him in the Copper Age. With regard to the making of this copper axe, Konrad Spindler, in his book The Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000-year-old Body Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age, reports:

“The blank of the blade was cast. This means that a certain quantity of metal was melted in a palm-sized thick-walled ceramic melting pot by heating it with bellows to at least 1100⁰ Centigrade; the molten copper was then poured into a mould which stood upright with the cutting edge facing downwards and the neck upwards.”

Casting copper is not an easy task as frequently the mold is not entirely filled, leaving holes and flaws in the final product. Konrad Spindler writes:

“Seeing that copper hardens under hammering, which is of course desirable for optimal use of the tool, but on the other hand runs the risk of cracking, the workman must strike an exact balance to ensure his product is successful and does not break.”

Additional indications that Ötzi was involved in copper tool production come from his hair. In an article in Current World Archaeology, Richard Hodges reports:

“Traces of arsenic were found in his hair, suggesting he worked with minerals, probably copper smelting.”

More insights into Copper Age European cultures are found on Ötzi’s body which has 61 tattoos. These tattoos are lines and crosses rather than pictorial designs in areas which would not have been easily visible to other people. This suggests that they were not symbolic indicators of clan or tribal affiliations or personal achievements. Richard Hodges reports:

“The marks at precise points where his body was subjected to considerable strain and were causing him pain. As such, it was a kind of acupuncture.”

In addition to the copper axe, Ötzi carried with him a number of other artifacts, including a bow, quiver with arrows, and a leather pouch attached to his belt which contained a bone awl, a scraper, a drill, and a flint flake. Richard Hodges reports:

“The awl was probably used for sewing as well as tasks like tattooing. The pouch also contained a nebulous lump of tinder fungus with slight traces of iron pyrites. This was almost certainly used by Ötzi for starting fires.”

Cultural innovations during the Copper Age involved more than just an increasing use of copper tools. During this era, there is the development of plow- and wheel-using cultures and an increased importance of specialized livestock rearing. It is during this time that the domesticated horse became more important. In his entry on the European Copper Age in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Andrew Sherratt sums up the importance of this era:

“The Copper Age thus witnessed a fundamental transformation in the nature of European cultures: from the domestic emphasis of nucleated settlements in the Balkans or through the use of their monumental surrogates in the form of collectively used megaliths in outer Europe, to the individualism of burial under a tumulus, with the equipment for the archetypal male roles of drinking and fighting, that could be found over an area from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

Archaeology today, of course, involves more than just examining artifacts and features: DNA, particularly ancient DNA extracted from human remains, tells part of the story of prehistory. In 2010, DNA was extracted from Ötzi which showed that he he belonged to the Y chromosome haplogroup G2a-L91. This haplogroup today is found primarily in Corsica and Sardina, neither of which is adjacent to the Alps where his body was found.

More Ancient Europe

Ancient Scotland: The Picts

Ancient Scotland: Skara Brae (Photo Diary)

Ancient Orkney: The Iron Age (Photo Diary)

Ancient Orkney: The Ring of Brodgar (Photo Diary)

Ancient Orkney: Stones of Stenness

Ancient Ireland: Stone Circles

Ancient Ireland: Round stone towers

Ancient Rome: Tools from Pompeii (Photo Diary)

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