Abstract
The quest for the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the world's earliest metallurgy has been dominating scholarly research on this topic for decades. This paper looks beyond the question of origins by discussing ‘how’ and ‘why’ metallurgy was invented. It looks into choices and skills involved in selection, experimentation and processing of distinctively coloured copper minerals and ores throughout c. 2000 years in the Balkans. The body of evidence is built around the currently earliest evidence for copper smelting, dated at c. 5000 bc and discovered in the Serbian Vinča culture site of Belovode. The ‘microstructure’ of a metal invention process is explored through optical and compositional analyses of a selection of copper minerals and metal production evidence: ores, slags, slagged sherds and metal droplets recovered from seven settlements in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, altogether dated between the late seventh and the late fifth millennia bc. This research suggests an independent technological trajectory of the emergence of metallurgy in the Balkans based on a unique technological meme, black and green mineral, which follows the evolution of early metallurgy from mono- to polymetallic within the fifth millennium bc.
Highlights
The quest for the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the world’s earliest metallurgy has been dominating scholarly research on this topic for decades
Inventions are hardly visible, and what archaeologists usually see is a mature form of technological innovation, already replicated within a population
Technological aspects surrounding the phenomenon of metal invention only and provide an in-depth analysis of the earliest metal-making recipes in western Eurasia
Summary
Technology, as much as culture, modifies through time, or, to put it in Darwin’s words, ‘descends with modification’. The concept of a technological meme (or techmeme) is understood to operate in the same way as a cultural meme does; it is technological information transmitted, stored or recombined by a wide variety of processes (Ziman 2000). The application of an evolutionary perspective in studying technology would require the presence of three main properties in the matter of examination: technological entities must be prone to multiplying; they must vary; and some of the variation must be hereditary (cf Jablonka & Ziman 2000, 13). Technology, has its own dynamics as well as evolutionary potential, which can be related to pre-existing elements, and triggered by various social, physical and ecological environments (cf Roux 2003).
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