Christopher Peter Thornton

Over the past two decades, significant changes in the study of ancient metallurgy have re-focused attention on ancient technological practices and the social behaviors they imbue. However, such anthropologically relevant research has not been universally adopted by all “archaeometallurgists,” nor applied in the same way even by those who endorse the new theoretical paradigm. In this article, five recent books on ancient metallurgy are reviewed to demonstrate the range and variety of archaeometallurgical literature in the early 21st century.

The authors reconsider the origins of metallurgy in the Old World and offer us a new model in which metallurgy began inc. eleventh/ninth millennium BC in Southwest Asia due to a desire to adorn the human body in life and death using colourful ores and naturally-occurring metals. In the early sixth millennium BC the techniques of smelting were developed to produce lead, copper, copper alloys and eventually silver. The authors come down firmly on the side of single invention, seeing the subsequent cultural transmission of the technology as led by groups of metalworkers following in the wake of exotic objects in metal.