Direct chronometry ( 14C AMS) of the earliest copper metallurgy in the Guadalquivir Basin (Spain) during the Third millennium BC: first regional database

Abstract

The characterisation of copper metallurgy in the Third millennium BC in the Southeast of the Iberian Peninsula as a simple and technological process on a domestic scale was the central axis that sustained a belated, underdeveloped appreciation for the Prehistory of the Iberian Peninsula and Western Europe dependent on the origin of social complexities. Nevertheless, this characterisation was incomplete since it was based more on the contexts of consumption than those of production and in territories used for agricultural rather than for mining purposes. Above all, however, it was incomplete because it lacked a precise spatial and temporal framework that evaluated the variability of the behaviours it articulated. To overcome these deficiencies, we have developed a systematic programme of interdisciplinary research aimed at documenting and dating, through the use of 14C AMS, the direct contexts of copper production of eight settlements that cover the populational variability (from 300 to 0.25 ha of surface area), chronology (between c. 3000 BC and c. 2000 BC), economic (settlements dedicated to mining, agriculture, etc.) and territorial along the axis of the backbone of the most fertile soils and primary (main) supplies of copper in the Iberian Peninsula: the Guadalquivir Basin. Results consist of the first systematic database, with sixty-six precise, direct radiocarbon dating of the metallurgical production of copper during the Third millennium BC, in the Iberian Peninsula and Western Europe. At the same time, it presents a variability of contexts (e.g. household, workshop, partial-time, full-time, factory, smelting quarter, etc.), in both time and space, affording a precise evaluation of social and territorial variability of behaviours that the production of copper shows us, a new historical explanation and the link between this and the development of social complexity.