killick and fenn 2012 archaeometallurgy ara 41

AN41CH33-Killick ARI 26 June 2012 13:59

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Archaeometallurgy: TheStudy of Preindustrial Miningand MetallurgyDavid Killick1 and Thomas Fenn2

1School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0030;email: [email protected] of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Geology Division, KatholiekeUniversiteit Leuven, Heverlee BE-3001, Belgium; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:559–75

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145719

Copyright c© 2012 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/12/1021-0559$20.00

Keywords

technology, innovation, materiality, production, exchange,archaeology

Abstract

Archaeometallurgy is an interdisciplinary and international field ofstudy that examines all aspects of the production, use, and consump-tion of metals from ∼7000 BCE to the present, although this reviewis restricted to mining and metallurgy in preindustrial societies. Mostof this literature was not written with an anthropological readership inmind, but many of its central themes are relevant to some current de-bates in anthropology. Since the 1970s, archaeometallurgists have beenconcerned explicitly with the materiality of metals and also with thehighly variable value of precious metals across time and space. Exactingcriteria have been developed for distinguishing past technology trans-fers from independent inventions. Archaeometallurgists have also doneimportant work on the social construction of technology in precapitalisteconomies. In short, archaeometallurgy offers much that is of interestto anthropologists who study the growth and spread of knowledge, andof systems of value, before the capitalist era.

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Review in Advance first posted online on July 9, 2012. (Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print.)

Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print

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INTRODUCTION

All readers of this review live in nations thatare completely dependent on the mechanical,electrical, and magnetic properties of metals.Metals are required for the frames of tallbuildings and large bridges, for all formsof motorized transportation, for generatingelectricity, for conducting electrical currentat scales varying from transcontinental powergrids to cell phones, for containing pressurizedliquids and gases, and for plowing the earth togrow food, and as catalysts to reduce pollutionfrom internal combustion engines, to crackcrude oil to gasoline, and to produce fertilizerfrom nitrogen in the air. Metals have otheruses as well for which they are not strictlynecessary but have been chosen through socialconvention or personal preference. Metalsand their alloys are valued for their colors,their reflectivity (or, conversely, their surfacecorrosion) in art, architecture, and jewelry,for coins and other tokens, as vehicles foraccumulating wealth, and for the tonality thatthey impart to many musical instruments.

Mining and metallurgy have also played ma-jor roles in world history. Because rich depositsof the scarcer metals (see Table 1) are rare,and rarely coincide in space with the regionsof greatest demand for them (Guilbert & Park1986), the quest for metals has been a ma-jor driver of exploration, long-distance trade,colonization, and imperialism. Long-distancetrade in metals began in the Old World before2000 BCE with copper and tin (Muhly 1973,1988; Weeks 2003) and expanded enormouslyduring the Roman Period, when productionof silver from Iberian lead ores is recorded inGreenland ice cores as a spike in lead and copperconcentrations of a magnitude not seen againuntil the Industrial Revolution (Hong et al.1994, 1996). Islamic trade with sub-Saharanand East Africa from the late eighth centuryCE led to the expanded exploitation of golddeposits, which stimulated state formation inboth the Sahel (Austen 2010) and in southernAfrica (Huffman 2009, Killick 2009). Africangold largely paid for the flow of Chinese and

Indian high-technology manufactures (porce-lain, wootz steel, zinc, and cotton and silk tex-tiles) to western Eurasia until the arrival of sil-ver from the Americas. The eastward flow ofAfrican gold was also indirectly responsible forthe diffusion of Chinese technologies for mak-ing gunpowder, paper, and the magnetic com-pass to Western Europe (Landes 1998, Pacey1990). Portuguese voyages of exploration in themid-fifteenth century CE were made to gain ac-cess to sub-Saharan sources of gold, and the ex-ploitation of gold and silver was the main reasonfor Spanish colonization of the New World inthe sixteenth century CE. Lastly, the IndustrialRevolution could not have occurred without astring of innovations in European ferrous met-allurgy. The most important of these were theblast furnace for the production of cast iron, thesubstitution of superabundant coal for increas-ingly scarce charcoal fuel (Hyde 1977), the pud-dling process for bulk conversion of cast ironto wrought iron, and the Bessemer and open-hearth processes for the production of bulk steelfrom cast iron (Gordon & Malone 1994, Hyde1977, Landes 1998).

The fields of economic history and arthistory have large literatures on metals. Wecannot discuss either here but focus instead onwork in archaeometallurgy. This is an extraor-dinarily interdisciplinary field of study, in whicharchaeologists, historians, numismatists, andphilologists collaborate with geologists, materi-als scientists, chemists, physicists, limnologists,botanists, toxicologists, mining engineers,blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and conservationscientists. [For examples of well-integrated,long-term interdisciplinary projects, seeHauptmann (2007), Ramage & Craddock(2000), Schmidt (1997), Shimada et al. (2007)].The topics investigated include the origins anddispersals of metallurgy, the reconstructionof extinct metallurgical technologies, and thetracing of metal objects to their geologicalsources by chemical and isotopic fingerprint-ing. We cannot review the impressive technicalaccomplishments in these areas within thespace allotted us; interested readers should con-sult instead the major syntheses by Craddock

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Table 1 Average crustal abundance (ACA) of metals and dates for evidence or earliest appearanceand regular usage

MetalACA

(ppm)a Earliest appearance/regular usageb

Copper (native) 55 Late ninth millennium BCELead 13 Late sixth millennium BCECopper (smelted) 55 Late sixth millennium BCESilver (native/smelted) 0.07 Mid-sixth millennium BCE/early fourth millennium BCEGold (native) <0.01 Fifth millennium BCEArsenic (as Cu-As alloy) 1.8 Fifth millennium BCEAntimony (as Cu-Sb alloy) 0.2 Fifth millennium BCETin (as Cu-Sn alloy) 2 Fourth millennium BCE/late third millennium BCEZinc (as Cu-Zn alloy) 70 Third millennium BCE/late first millennium BCEIron 50,000 Early second millennium BCE/late second millennium BCEAluminum 81,300 Late nineteenth century CETitanium 4,400 Late nineteenth century CEManganese 950 Late nineteenth century CEVanadium 135 Late nineteenth century CEChromium 100 Late nineteenth century CE

aParts per million (Krauskopf & Bird 1995, p. 589).bFrom Craddock (1998), Gale & Stos-Gale (1981), Killick (2001), Thornton (2007).

(1995) and Roberts & Thornton (2013). Wehave chosen instead to focus on aspects that arerelevant to some current issues in anthropolog-ical archaeology. These are (a) materiality ofmetals, (b) origins and dispersals of metallurgy,(c) invention and innovation, (d ) choicesand values, and (e) human impacts on theenvironment.

Our review is limited to literature inEnglish, French, and German. There arealso archaeometallurgical literatures inRussian, Chinese, Polish, Czech, Swedish,Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, andTurkish, but our knowledge of these is limitedto summaries in languages that we can read.

THE MATERIALITY OF METALSAND THE USES OF METALSBEFORE METALLURGY

In studying prehistoric technologies, the majortrap for the unwary is presentism. We musttry to forget what we know about the uses ofmetals in industrial societies and to try to avoid

making any assumptions about the immedi-ate social or economic consequences of theearliest metallurgy. Lewis Henry Morgan andV. Gordon Childe both fell into the presentisttrap by assuming that the initial discoveryof metals would have rapidly revolutionizedproduction and thereby transformed society.Friedrich Engels (1972), on the other hand,came close to present scholarly opinion whenhe wrote in 1884 that metals did not play amajor role in production until iron becamewidely available (p. 222). The popular beliefthat the invention of metals was a “revolution”in prehistory is a legacy of Childe’s views(especially Childe 1930, 1944) but has longbeen discarded by archaeometallurgists. Metalsdid eventually transform production in theOld World but were reserved largely fordecorative and ritual uses in the Americasuntil European colonization. In both theOld and New Worlds, however, the desirefor metals as exotic materials played a partin the development of almost all complexsocieties.

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The current consensus on the originsof metallurgy largely reflects the views ofthe distinguished metallurgist Cyril StanleySmith (1903–1992), one of the founders ofarchaeometallurgy (Goodway 1992). In aseries of elegant papers, he argued that theorigins of metallurgy should be sought in whatwould today be called their materiality (Smith1970, 1975, 1981, 1988). In his view, therelevant properties of metals at first were color,luster, ductility, and tonality. Metals were rareand novel materials in the contexts of earlyagricultural societies and, thus, were eminentlysuitable for making objects of distinction.Through continuous sensual engagementwith these materials, Smith suggested, furtherprocesses (notably casting, alloying, and heattreatment) were eventually developed thatmade metals more suitable for tools andweapons. But realization of the functionalpotential of metals did not end sensuousengagement with them. Extremely elaboratemetallurgical techniques (such as pattern weld-ing in Iron Age Europe, the “Damascus” steelof the Islamic era, and the composite Japanesesword) were later developed to make functionalweapons that were also objects of beauty andadvertisements of status (Smith 1981).

Smith’s insistence upon the link betweenmateriality and invention greatly influenced thedevelopment of archaeometallurgy in NorthAmerica (e.g., Goodway & Conklin 1987;Hosler 1994; Lechtman 1979, 1984; Newbury& Notis 2004; Notis 1988; Wertime & Wer-time 1982). It has also been invoked by Amer-ican scholars to explain the earliest evidence ofceramic pyrotechnologies, especially fired clay(Barnett & Hoopes 1995, Vandiver et al. 1989),lime and gypsum plasters (Gourdin & Kingery1975, Kingery et al. 1988), and Egyptian faience(Vandiver & Kingery 1986). Yet most of thiswork appears to have been missed by Europeanproponents of materiality in archaeology.

The first metal to appear in the archaeolog-ical record was copper. Although most of thecopper in ore deposits is locked up in oxides,carbonates, and sulfides, a small fraction is in theform of metallic (native) copper. Native copper

is intimately associated with the copper min-erals malachite and dioptase (both green), azu-rite (blue), and turquoise and chrysocolla (bothvariable from blue to green). These blue andgreen minerals first appear in the archaeologi-cal record of the Near East and Iran from thetwelfth to the eleventh millennia BCE and be-came widely distributed in Iran (Solecki 1969)and in the Levant by the eighth to the sev-enth millennia BCE (Bar-Yosef Mayer & Porat2008, Schoop 1995, Thornton 2009). The ear-liest known evidence for the use of native cop-per in these regions dates to the late ninth mil-lennium BCE at the site of Cayonu in Anatolia,where it was crudely hammered—with periodicannealing (reheating) in a fire to prevent stresscracking—into ornaments (Stech 1999).

Why are these materials not recovered fromolder archaeological sites within the FertileCrescent? Copper is a geologically scarceelement (Table 1), and there are no significantcopper deposits in this region. There arealso no obsidian sources within the FertileCrescent, and copper minerals first came tothe Levant and Mesopotamia as riders on theobsidian trade from Anatolia, which began inthe thirteenth century BCE (Schoop 1995,Thornton 2009).

Native copper working was independentlyinvented by ∼4500 BCE in North Americaaround the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,which is home to the world’s largest depositsof native copper (Ehrhardt 2009, Martin1999). The earliest copper objects here includeheavy-duty tools, such as socketed axes, somewith edge damage indicating use. Both usedand apparently unused copper objects weredeposited in graves of the Late Archaic period.This difference between the initial use ofcopper in the Old and New Worlds is probablya function of variation in the raw material:The Michigan deposits are almost unique inproviding lumps of native copper large enoughto make a substantial object without joining ormelting together smaller pieces.

Gold almost invariably occurs as the nativemetal, yet the earliest known finds of gold—in the regions north and west of the Black Sea

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(Chernykh 1992)—date only to the mid-fifthmillennium BCE. Why does gold appear in thearchaeological record so much later than cop-per? Gold is much less abundant than copper inthe earth’s crust (Table 1) but may be concen-trated by erosion to form rich placers in streams.Most placer gold is in tiny flakes that can be con-solidated only by melting. The melting pointof gold is 1064◦C, well above the tempera-ture of an open fire (Rehder 2000), so forcedair—delivered by lung power through blow-pipes or by bellows through tuyeres (ceramicor stone tubes)—and ceramic crucibles wouldbe essential (Craddock 1995). These technolo-gies are also required to smelt and cast cop-per, which has a melting point of 1084◦C, andthus gold first attains archaeological visibilityin western Eurasia at about the same time asthe first smelted copper (Chernykh 1992). It iscertainly possible that there was earlier use ofgold nuggets, which could be simply hammeredto shape, but these are always much scarcerthan flake gold, and no evidence of their earlieruse has yet been reported in the Old World.The earliest documented use of any metal inSouth America is, however, a necklace contain-ing gold beads hammered from nuggets, datedto ∼2000 BCE (Aldenderfer et al. 2008).

ORIGINS AND DISPERSALOF METALLURGICALTECHNOLOGIES

The working of native copper by forging andannealing is best seen as premetallurgical. Met-allurgy really begins with smelting, the earliestevidence of which is copper smelting dated to∼5000 BCE in both Serbia (Radivojevic et al.2010) and Iran (Frame 2009, 2012). Earlier evi-dence of smelting will emerge as archaeologistslearn how to recognize the ephemeral residuesof the earliest smelting experiments (Bourgarit2007), but there are more interesting questionsto investigate than when and where. Why didextractive metallurgy begin with geologicallyscarce metals, rather than with the geologicallyabundant (Table 1)? Why was there such a longgap between the first crude hammering and

annealing (reheating) of native copper and theappearance of extractive metallurgy (the smelt-ing of metals from ores)? Did smelting in theOld World diffuse outward from the MiddleEast, or was it invented multiple times? (Itwas undoubtedly invented independently in theNew World).

As Table 1 shows, some of the rarer met-als were the first to be used, whereas the mostabundant were, with the sole exception of iron,not used until the past two centuries. This para-dox is easily resolved by considering thermody-namic constraints. The historical sequence ofthe use of metals correlates quite well with thefree energy of formation of the oxide of eachmetal (Charles 1980). Gold and platinum donot form stable oxides and, thus, are usuallyfound as the native metal. Silver, lead, and cop-per bind relatively weakly to oxygen and aresometimes found as native metals, though mostof the earth’s store of them is in oxides or sul-fides. Iron binds much more strongly to oxygen,and titanium and aluminum more strongly still.The consistent appearance of a new smeltedmetal in the archaeological record thus marksa definite advance in human understanding ofthe material world. More specifically, its ap-pearance indexes the attainment of a definitecombination of temperature and partial pres-sure of oxygen inside a reaction vessel (a cru-cible or furnace). The smelting of iron does notrequire higher temperatures than those neededto smelt copper, but very low partial pressuresof oxygen are required to reduce iron from itsoxide. This is why more than three millenniaelapsed between the first known copper smelt-ing and the first known evidence of iron smelt-ing. To take a much longer perspective, morethan 300,000 years elapsed between the earliestknown use of iron minerals for pigment (Dart &Beaumont 1969, Schmandt-Besserat 1980) andthe mastery of iron smelting.

The gap of at least three millennia betweenthe initial use of native copper and the firstappearance(s) of smelted copper reflects thefact that a package of new technologies wasrequired, not just a single technological innova-tion. Lead sulfides can be reduced to lead metal



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in an open bonfire, but the reduction of copperoxides required all of the following: (a) the useof charcoal instead of wood to produce suffi-cient reducing agent (carbon monoxide) to stripthe oxygen from metal oxides (Rehder 2000);(b) ceramic-tipped blowpipes, or bellows andceramic tubes (tuyeres), to force the charcoal toburn faster, yielding higher temperatures; and(c) ceramic crucibles to contain the chemicalreaction and to remelt the smelted copper(Craddock 1995, 2000/2001; Hauptmann2007).

Whether there were single or multiple in-ventions of metallurgy in the Old World isstill actively debated. Childe, working beforethe birth of either radiocarbon dating or ar-chaeometallurgy, believed that copper metal-lurgy was too complex a technology to havebeen invented more than once. He placed itsorigins in the Near East (Childe 1944, 1957).Colin Renfrew (1967, 1969) argued from thespatial distribution of early calibrated radiocar-bon ages that there were at least three indepen-dent inventions of copper metallurgy: in theNear East, in the Balkans, and in Iberia. Thehighly influential unilineal evolutionary se-quence for metallurgy developed by TheodoreWertime (1964, 1973) and Jim Charles (1980)did not necessarily require a single origin butemployed geological determinism to argue thatthe same sequence (native copper → smeltedcopper → arsenical copper → tin bronze)would be found in any region of metallurgicalinnovation. From the 1960s, some scholars be-gan to argue that copper metallurgy in Chinawas developed independently (e.g., Barnard &Sato 1975), and this became the standard posi-tion until the late 1990s.

Many new data have surfaced since the1990s, and the pendulum is swinging again.Recent arguments for a single center of inno-vation in Southwest Asia include the extremediffusionism of Amzallag (2009), who seesmigrations of metalworkers carrying coppermetallurgy from present Israel to the rest of theOld World. Roberts et al. (2009) acknowledgethe “virtually synchronous” (p. 1014) appear-ance of copper metallurgy in a region from Iran

to the Balkans, but they assert that this mustmean that a single region of invention near thecenter of this zone—probably in Anatolia—awaits discovery. Recent debate on the originsof copper metallurgy in China is more interest-ing because it is better grounded in data. Until1990, the dominant view was that metallurgyarose independently in the Central Plain ofChina and spread west, north, and south fromthere. Two recent developments have forced arethinking of this position. The first is a torrentof new archaeometallurgical data from westernand northern China, which shows that both thetypes of artifacts and the alloys used in these re-gions differ markedly from those in the CentralPlain (Linduff & Mei 2009, Mei 2009). The sec-ond was the end of the Cold War, which madeit possible for Chinese, Russian, and Westernarchaeometallurgists to collaborate freely.Better communication led to the realizationthat several very distinctive copper alloy artifacttypes occur in archaeological sites from Finlandto western China (Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang)at ∼2000 BCE (Chernykh 2009, Mei 2009).Lead isotope ratios are not available for theseartifacts, so it is not yet possible to determinewhere the metals originated; on typologicalgrounds alone, however, it appears increasinglylikely that copper and gold metallurgy passedacross the steppes from Central Asia to China.The Central Plain has been recast as a metal-lurgical anomaly whose origins cannot yet bedetermined (Linduff & Mei 2009, Mei 2009).Metallurgy seems to appear there slightly laterthan in surrounding areas, but the techniques,alloys, and uses of metals were so differentfrom those of surrounding regions that anindependent invention of metallurgy remainsa possibility (Linduff & Mei 2009, Mei 2009).

Scholars have recently been rethinking theorigins and spread of iron metallurgy. This is-sue appeared to have been settled by the majorsynthesis edited by Wertime & Muhly (1980),which saw two independent origins of iron met-allurgy: in Anatolia and in China. In Anatoliaboth archaeological and written evidence ( Jean2001, Souckova-Siegolova 2001) show that ironwas available in very limited quantities as early

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as 1800 BCE and was in general use by elites,though not by commoners, during the NewHittite Empire (∼1400–1200 BCE). [The irondagger found in the tomb of Egyptian PharaohTutankhamen (died 1323 BCE) is thought tobe a gift from a Hittite ruler (Valloggia 2001)].Except in China, all iron smelting from Hittitetimes through the early Islamic era was by thebloomery process, which yielded a solid product(the bloom) that was refined and shaped by forg-ing (Craddock 1995). Until recently there wasno evidence of the bloomery process in China;from the beginning, it appeared, high-carbon(cast) iron was tapped as a liquid from blastfurnaces, then cast to shape or decarburized tolow-carbon iron for forging. It was thereforeassumed that iron smelting was independentlyinvented in China and that cast iron productionand use later spread through the Islamic worldto Europe (Needham 1956, 1980).

Archaeometallurgical studies in China havenow turned up iron made by the bloomery pro-cess as early as the ninth or eighth centuriesBCE (Guo 2009, Wagner 2008). Whether ironmetallurgy was initially brought to China orlocally invented is ultimately of little conse-quence, given that by the eighth or seventhcenturies BCE iron metallurgy was totally rein-vented in China. Blast furnace technology isstill thought to have spread west from Chinaduring the Islamic era (Al-Hassan & Hill 1986,Wagner 2008), but good evidence now in-dicates that it was independently developedin Germany from the bloomery process(Gassmann et al. 1995, Yalcın & Hauptmann1995). The earliest excavated blast furnace inSweden, used between 1150 and 1350 CE, ishowever quite similar to contemporary Chinesemodels; the technology may have been broughtto Sweden from the southern Caspian by Vikingmerchants (Magnusson 1985, Wagner 2008).

The remaining problems in documentingorigins and dispersals of metallurgy are mostlychronological. Renfrew (1967, 1969) used earlyradiocarbon dates to propose an independentinvention of metallurgy in Iberia, but the datingof the evidence is now in question (Roberts2009). Over the past 40 years, multiple scholars

have made claims for independent invention(s)of metallurgy in sub-Saharan Africa, basedsolely on radiocarbon dates. The exhaustivereview of Alpern (2005) shows that these claimsare all rendered uncertain by (a) doubts aboutthe stratigraphic association of the radiocarbonsamples with metals or metallurgical residues;(b) the possible use of old wood or old charcoalas fuel, particularly in semiarid areas; and(c) failure to respect the limitations of theradiocarbon calibration curve, and in particularthe “dead zone” between 800 and 400 calBCE. Even the most recent claim—for an ironforge in the Central African Republic dated to2000–1800 cal BCE (Zangato & Holl 2010)—isundermined by inadequate publication of sitestratigraphy (Clist 2012), failure to publish theassociated pottery, and failure to cross-checkthe radiocarbon dates by luminescence dating.A similar controversy is raging in India overiron artifacts in association with radiocarbondates of 1800–1300 cal BCE (Tewari 2003,2010). But nowhere has the search for theorigins of metallurgy been more confused by ra-diocarbon dating than in Thailand. Three seriesof radiocarbon dates from the key site of BanChiang have been obtained at different times on(a) charcoal from grave fills, (b) carbon in pot-sherds, and (c) human and faunal bone collagen.The first two series have been used to arguefor direct diffusion of metallurgy to Thailandfrom the Central Asian steppes ∼2000 cal BCE(White & Hamilton 2009). The most recent—and most convincing—series on bone collagendates the same graves to 1100–900 BCE. Thesemake the diffusion of metallurgy from Chinamuch more probable (Higham et al. 2011).

ARCHAEOMETALLURGY ANDSTUDIES OF INVENTION,INNOVATION, AND DIFFUSION

Since the late 1980s, there has been aresurgence of interest within Anglophonearchaeology in studies of innovation (O’Brien2008; O’Brien & Shennan 2010; Schiffer1992, 2011; Shennan 2008; van der Leeuw &Torrence 1989). What strikes us in reading this



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literature is how top-heavy, and how presen-tist, it is. We do not deny the importanceof theory and modeling in archaeology, butthey are of value only to the extent that theyactually enrich our understanding of the past.Yet most applications of current theories oftechnological innovation to the archaeologicalrecord are disappointingly thin. [A notableexception is Roux (2010).] Indeed, many of theapplications offered are studies of invention,innovation, or diffusion in modern times, asthough there were no fundamental differencesin innovation processes between industrial andpreindustrial societies. [For innovation anddiffusion processes in industrial societies, seeArthur (2009) and Rogers (2003).]

Anyone interested in testing these modelswith data from preindustrial societies can findrich data in the archaeometallurgical literature.Over the past two decades archaeometallur-gists have refined their methods to the pointthat they can detect inventions in the mostephemeral residues. Intensive chemical, miner-alogical, and microstructural laboratory studyof actual archaeological residues may be com-pared with residues generated by full-scale ex-perimental metallurgical processes, and to theproducts of laboratory experiments at reducedscale under more rigorously controlled temper-atures and furnace atmospheres (e.g., Bourgarit2007). Using these methods, archaeometallur-gists can document inventions and innovationswith a high degree of confidence.

One example of an innovation awaiting ex-planation is the wind-powered iron-smeltingfurnace of medieval Sri Lanka, the operationof which has been brilliantly elucidated byexperimental archaeology ( Juleff 1996, 1998)and computational fluid dynamics (Tabor et al.2005). Another notable technical success await-ing full explanation is the reconstruction of thetechnology developed at Sardis to separate nat-ural gold-silver alloys (electrum) into pure goldand pure silver (Ramage & Craddock 2000).This process made it possible for the Lydiankings (one of whom was Croesus) to issue thefirst gold and silver coinages in the sixth centuryBCE.

Archaeometallurgists are also adept at dis-covering inventions that failed to become in-novations. The multiple inventions of brass area case in point. Although zinc is more abundantthan either copper or tin (Table 1), brass (thealloy of copper and zinc) did not achieve thestatus of an innovation in western Eurasia untilthe first century BCE, some two millennia af-ter bronze. This discrepancy is because moltenzinc metal readily volatilizes from smelting fur-naces and is lost to the atmosphere. The inno-vation that made brass the standard alloy of theRoman empire from the first century BCE wasthe cementation process, in which zinc oxidewas heated with copper metal and charcoal ina sealed crucible (Craddock & Eckstein 2003).Yet more than 30 artifacts of brass have beenrecorded in western Eurasia before this time,some dated as early as the third millenniumBCE (Thornton 2007). The makers of theseobjects were either unaware of their inventions(low-zinc brass looks and behaves much likebronze) or unable to reproduce the necessaryconditions. Indian metallurgists made brass,probably by cementation, from at least the mid-first millennium BCE but by the twelfth cen-tury CE had developed a different method inwhich metallic copper was directly alloyed withmetallic zinc (Craddock et al. 1998). This isin marked contrast to the situation in westernEurasia, where there are hardly any credible in-stances of the production of metallic zinc beforethe mid-eighteenth century CE (Craddock &Eckstein 2003). What was different in India?Metallic zinc must be made by distillation, andit is probably relevant that there was a long priorhistory in Indian and in Islamic technology ofthe distillation of plant oils for use in medicinesand perfumes (Al-Hassan & Hill 1986).

Sub-Saharan Africa has long suffered thescorn of European observers for its supposedlack of technological innovation. To cite buttwo from among many examples (Adas 1989),we offer David Hume [“No ingenious manu-factures among them, no arts, no sciences· · ·”(Hume 1758, p. 125, footnote)] and GeorgHegel [“. . . . capable of no development or cul-ture, and as we see them at this day, such

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have they always been” (Hegel 1900 [1840],p. 116)]. Such contempt stimulated searchesover the past 60 years for technological inno-vations in prehistoric Africa. Prominent amongthese efforts are multiple claims that iron met-allurgy was independently invented in Africa.This has long been the most contentious is-sue in later African archaeology (Alpern 2005,Diop 1968, Trigger 1969) and has flared upanew with the recent publication of radiocar-bon dates of ∼2000–1800 cal BCE for twoundoubted iron forges in the Central AfricanRepublic (Zangato & Holl 2010; for critiquessee Clist 2012, Craddock 2010). Other scholarshave also claimed that Africans invented a dis-tinct method of making steel (the direct steelprocess) and were the first to use preheatedair blast, a technique of crucial importance inmodern iron smelting (Schmidt & Avery 1978,1983; van der Merwe & Avery 1982; disputedby Killick 1996). The essentially reactive natureof these claims has obscured the fact that a trulyremarkable variety of iron-smelting technolo-gies have been recorded in Africa within the past150 years (Cline 1937; Herbert 1994; Killick1991, 1995). A mere handful of these have beenstudied by archaeometallurgists, but they havedocumented—on paper and in video—designsand processes that are unique to Africa, orrarely noted elsewhere (e.g., David et al. 1989,Huysecom & Agustoni 1997, Killick 1991,Schmidt 1997). Clearly there was no lack of in-vention in African metallurgy. Yet there was—in marked contrast to China and to WesternEurope—no major increase in the productivityof iron smelting over time. It seems likely thatlow productivity reflected low demand for ironin Africa, a consequence of already low popula-tion densities that were further depressed by theIslamic and trans-Atlantic slave trades. Para-doxically, the trans-Atlantic slave trade stimu-lated commerce along slaving routes in WestAfrica and did lead to more productive iron-working industries in some areas. But mod-estly greater productivity was achieved throughchanges in the social organization of produc-tion, rather than through technical innovation(de Barros 2000).

METALLURGY, WAYS OFSEEING, AND VALUE

The statement that technologies are sociallyconstructed has become axiomatic amonghistorians and sociologists of technologysince the early 1990s (e.g., MacKenzie &Wajcman 1999). The archaeometallurgistHeather Lechtman was an early proponent ofthis view (Lechtman 1977). She argued thatin different regions of the world distinctivelydifferent technological trajectories could berecognized, for which she coined the term“technological styles.” The essentially identicalconcept of “technological choices” developedindependently in France (e.g., Cresswell 1983;Lemonnier 1992, 1993; Roux 1990, 2010) andcan be traced back to the pioneering insights ofthe archaeologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan (1943,1964).

Archaeometallurgy provides some of thebest examples of precapitalist technologicalstyles. For example, historical documents andethnoarchaeological field research show that inmany African societies the smelting of iron wasunderstood as exactly equivalent to gestationand birth. The furnace was a woman, the ironbloom growing in the furnace was the fetus, andits male attendants were simultaneously hus-bands and midwives. In some instances, thisequivalence was explicit, with furnaces modeledas women’s bodies or bellows as male genitalia.More commonly, it was implied by the behav-ior of the ironworkers, who were often prohib-ited from sexual intercourse for the duration ofthe smelt and were frequently isolated in smelt-ing camps to ensure compliance (Childs 1991;Herbert 1994; Schmidt 1997, 2009). In short,this is a classic example of the symbolic appro-priation by men of women’s generative powers.

Archaeometallurgists have long been awareof spatial and chronological differences in thevalue of metals and have often sought to linkthis to their colors (e.g., Herbert 1984; Hosler1994, 2009). The Eurasian obsession withgold and silver began in the Balkans around5000 BCE (Chernykh 1992, Renfrew 1986)and was gradually adopted across the whole



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continent, except in the Central Plain of China,where these metals were ignored in favor oftin bronze (Linduff & Mei 2009). Gold andsilver were also highly valued in Egypt, Nubia,and Carthage. But neither gold nor silver wasused south of the Sahara (except in Nubia andpre-Axumite/Axumite Eritrea, both of whichhad trade links to the Mediterranean) until theIslamic era, when sub-Saharan Africa becamethe major source of gold for Eurasia. At thispoint, the African elites who emerged to con-trol the gold trade adopted the use of gold asa marker of distinction (Austen 2010, Huffman2009, Killick 2009). The absence of gold fromearlier archaeological sites cannot plausiblybe attributed to ignorance because it could bepanned with little effort from rivers, and IronAge Africans certainly had the technology tomelt and cast it. But, as Herbert (1984) hasso convincingly demonstrated, they greatlypreferred the red color of unalloyed copper,which they reserved largely for ornaments,using iron for weapons and tools. Why thispreference should have applied across almostall of sub-Saharan Africa remains unexplained.

Gold was the first metal used in SouthAmerica, and elaborate chemical treatmentswere subsequently invented to develop a va-riety of surface colors on tumbaga (copper-gold-silver alloy) bodies (Lechtman 1979, 1984,1993; Saunders 2002). The symbolic signifi-cance of these colors in prehistoric contextsis unknown, but there is an ethnographic linkbetween metallurgy and cosmology in Colom-bia, where Tukanoan color symbolism has some30 named hues between yellow-white (the sun,male potency) and coppery red (the waningmoon, female generativity). “Ideally, the sunfertilizes a brilliant new moon, which [then]passes through a sequence of yellowish, red-dish and copper-colored phases which are com-pared to· · ·the process of embryonic develop-ment” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1981, p. 121, citedby Lechtman 1993, p. 270). The triad of sil-ver, copper, and gold metallurgy later spreadby sea from Ecuador to Mexico (Hosler 1994,2009), where metals were used almost exclu-sively for ornaments, but no further north. In

North America, neither gold nor silver wasever used before European colonization. As inpre-Islamic sub-Saharan Africa, the red colorof unalloyed copper was particularly valued(Ehrhardt 2009, Martin 1999), and gold wasleft in the rivers to prompt the gold rushes ofEuropean colonists.

IMPACT OF METALLURGY ONTHE ENVIRONMENT

The past two decades have seen an intensivesearch in stratified environmental archives(ice caps, lake sediments, and peat bogs) forrecords of past metallurgical production.These studies were originally motivated bythe search for continuous quantitative recordsof lead pollution (Nriagu 1983). This searchled to the discovery of Roman-era peaks forlead and copper concentrations in ice coresfrom Greenland (Hong et al. 1994, 1996).This is the first known instance of globalatmospheric pollution. Subsequent studies onmore local scales have documented the historyand scale of mining in the Andes (Cooke et al.2008, 2009), western Europe (Alfonso et al.2001, Baron et al. 2005, Harrison et al. 2010,Jouffroy-Bapicot et al. 2007, Martınez Cortizaset al. 2002), and China (Lee et al. 2008). Envi-ronmental archives provide the only survivingevidence in some regions for the timing andscale of past mining and metallurgy, as for ex-ample in the tin deposits of southwest England(Meharg et al. 2011). They also provide theonly future means of documenting the scale ofpast production in those metallurgical districtsthat are now being destroyed, without adequatearchaeological investigation, by vast open-pitmines in Africa, southeast Asia, and LatinAmerica.

Related studies have measured levels oftoxic metals in water, sediment, and humanskeletons from former mining districts, asfor example in the Feynan valley of Jordan,whose copper deposits were exploited from theBronze Age through the Ottoman empire (e.g.,Grattan et al. 2003a,b; Pyatt & Grattan 2001).Pollen recovered from cores in lake sediments

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and peat bogs has been used to study changes invegetation that may reflect the exploitation ofwoodlands for charcoal to fuel metallurgicalfurnaces (e.g., Breitenlechner et al. 2010;Mighall & Chambers 1989, 1993; Pelachs et al.2009). The rapid growth in publication of theseinterdisciplinary environmental studies docu-ments the slow growth of human impacts onthe environment and highlights the alarminglyaccelerated rate at which we are now depletingnonrenewable sources of geochemically scarcemetals (e.g., Anreiter et al. 2010, Gordon et al.2006).

CONCLUSION

Over the past 50 years archaeometallurgy hasbecome a well-integrated and highly productiveinterdisciplinary field of study. But archaeomet-allurgists have not yet succeeded in convincingmost archaeologists of the relevance of theirwork. One consequence of this is that there arefewer archaeometallurgists in university facultypositions in Europe and North America thanthere were in the late 1990s. We suggest threereasons for this decrease. The first is that manyof the senior figures in the field today were

trained in other disciplines (geology, chemistry,materials science, etc.) and have tended to fo-cus on the technical issues of reconstruction andprovenance rather than on using their rich datato engage with central issues in archaeologyand anthropology. The second reason is thatarchaeometallurgy is now large enough to sup-port specialist conference series, with the con-sequence that much of this work tends to bepresented there or at specialist meetings of ar-chaeological scientists. The third reason is thatsome of the most interesting work has beendone in East Asia, Africa, and Latin Americaand is too rarely summarized for scholars whoare not specialists in those areas.

We have had two aims in writing this re-view. The first is to urge more archaeometal-lurgists to contribute to wider issues and de-bates in archaeology. The second is to makemore archaeologists and anthropologists awareof some relevant accomplishments and findingsof archaeometallurgy, and especially to urgethose who are interested in studies of materi-ality, value, and technological change to lookinto the many detailed case studies in this field.As Cyril Smith was fond of saying, metallurgyis a fully human experience.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings thatmight be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

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