The earliest metal relics ever found in China are two brass artifacts from the Yangshao Culture Ruins in Jiangzai Village, Lingtong County, Shaanxi Province. They date as far back as 6,000 years ago, providing strong evidence that metallurgy germinated in China during that period. Considering that studies of possibly earlier metal relics are not done thoroughly enough, the problem of the origin of metallurgy in China has yet to be further explored.
By the latter part of the third millennium BCE, metallurgy had come into being in a number of regions, and many kinds of metal materials – red copper, primitive brass, tin bronze, and lead–tin bronze – were already used for small implements and ornaments.
The Xia Dynasty (twenty‐first century to sixteenth century BCE) had evolved into the Bronze Age. In Erlitou Cultural Ruins, Yanshi County, Henan Providence, remains of foundry workshops have been discovered where bronze sacrificial vessels, weapons, implements, and casting moulds have been...
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Jueming, H. (2008). Metallurgy in China. 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_9164
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