Mystery Of 8,500-Year-Old Copper-Making Event Revealed Through Materials Science

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Mystery Of 8,500-Year-Old Copper-Making Event Revealed Through Materials Science

An international team of archaeological scientists have put an end to the more than half-a-century old claim about the earliest copper smelting event at the Late Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey – one of the world’s best-studied prehistoric archaeological sites.

Çatalhöyük is located overlooking the Konya Plain, southeast of the present-day city of Konya (ancient Iconium) in Turkey, approximately 140 km (87 mi) from the twin-coned volcano of Mount Hasan. The eastern settlement forms a mound which would have risen about 20 m (66 ft) above the plain at the time of the latest Neolithic occupation. There is also a smaller settlement mound to the west and a Byzantine settlement a few hundred meters to the east. The prehistoric mound settlements were abandoned before the Bronze Age. A channel of the Çarşamba river once flowed between the two mounds, and the settlement was built on alluvial clay which may have been favourable for early agriculture.

Scholars have been hotly debating the origins and spread of metallurgy for decades, mainly due to the relationship this technology had with the rise of social complexity and economy of the world’s first civilizations in the Near East.Wall painting of a bull, deer and man from Çatalhöyük; 6th millennium BC; reconstruction in their original positions of the bull’s heads and the human relief-figure; Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey

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