The Near East represents one of the earliest centers for the development of metallurgical technology and is crucial to the investigation of issues related to the development of metallurgy (Tylecote 1986, 1987, 1992; Muhly 1988; Wertheim and Muhly 1980). Metallurgy appears very early, with the recovery of cold‐hammered copper artifacts from the Late Pre‐Pottery Neolithic. With the development of smelting techniques, copper metallurgy spreads fairly quickly and widely during the Chalcolithic. Metallurgy spread ever more rapidly when it was discovered that the properties of copper could be improved by alloying copper with other metals such as arsenic, lead, or tin, to produce bronze. Bronze tools begin to be found in the Early Bronze Age (EBA). By the Middle Bronze Age, the use of bronze becomes more frequent (Maddin et al. 1999; Mellaart 1976; Moorey 1998; Redman 1978). However, it is impossible to document the introduction and spread of metallurgy into a region by simply using the...
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Liora Horwitz, Elizabeth Arnold, Matthew Singer, Tina Jongsma, the late Eitan Tchernov, and the many excavators for access to and use of the data presented in this report. Any errors are of my own making. Based on a paper originally presented in the session “Organic Approaches to Near Eastern Archaeology,” organized by Ed Maher, at the Annual Meeting of the American School of Oriental Research, November 19–23, Toronto.
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Greenfield, H.J. (2008). Metallurgy in the Near East. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8819
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