When archaeologists or probers come across metal objects that got into the ground before the 19th century, the variety of materials is limited.

In ancient times only eight different elements were known in their metallic form: gold, silver, lead, copper, tin and iron as well as mercury and - in ancient America - platinum.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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The abundance of certain materials has given their names to entire ages.

Iron, for example, mostly dates from the Iron Age, which began in Central Europe around 800 BC.

Began.

If, on the other hand, bronze is found, you are often dealing with a piece from the Bronze Age.

Accordingly, there was a Stone Age before that and a Copper Age in between.

Ötzi, for example, who died around 3200 BC, falls into this category.

Died and survived in the Alps as a glacier mummy, along with a copper ax that was found on him.

In the beginning there was lead

In fact, interest in metals began deep in the Neolithic. The earliest archaeological gold finds include pieces of jewelry that come from 6000 year old graves of the Varna culture on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. These objects were hammered together from nuggets or tinsel. But a little later, cast gold objects can also be detected in Susa in the southwest of today's Iran. Like gold, silver also occurs naturally as a metal, but does not shine as beautifully there. That is why the earliest silver artifacts - they were made around 3500 BC. Made in Iran, Eastern Anatolia and Northern Syria - products of a process known as cupellation, in which an alloy of silver and lead is first created from lead ores containing silver, before the latter is then oxidized.

Lead is also a historically important material.

“In cultural history, lead may even be the first metal to be smelted,” says Ernst Pernicka, director of the Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry in Mannheim.

There is a lead bracelet from Yarim Tepe in Iraq, which dates back to about 6000 BC.

Dated.

The specialist in archaeological metals suspects that the transformation of crumbly lead ores into a ductile material when heated accidentally could have paved the way for the targeted smelting of copper ores.

The idea of ​​pouring molten metal into molds could also be owed to the lead, with its low melting point of only 327 degrees Celsius.

Every campfire gets that hot.

Ores in the fashionable color of the Neolithic

Copper, on the other hand, only melts at 1082 degrees, in order to dissolve it from its ores, there must also be a lack of oxygen. These conditions are quite well achieved in kilns for pottery, but copper ores were already noticed in the early pre-ceramic Neolithic: In eastern Turkey, chunks of copper minerals were found that someone must have collected around 9500 BC, probably because of their green color. In the palette of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures, green had not yet played a role; in their cave paintings, shades of red predominated. The early farmers, however, made jewelry pearls from green copper minerals, and in the early eighth millennium BC, also in Eastern Anatolia, natural copper was hammered into shape until somebody found outhow one could extract the reddish shining metal from those green stones by means of great heat.