Working with copper

The story

A man on the glacier

On 19 September 1991 two German hikers from Nuremberg, Helmut and Erika Simon, were walking in the Alps, at over 3,200 metres, near the Tisenjoch pass, between Italy and Austria. That summer had been very hot and the snow had melted more than usual. In a hollow of ice they saw something sticking out: a dark back, a head, brown skin, like that of a mountaineer who had died recently. They told the mountain huts. The first people to arrive, police and rescuers, tried to free the body from the ice with pickaxes and even a pneumatic drill, damaging it a little. Only afterwards, when archaeologists looked at the objects found beside the body, was it understood that this man had not died a few years earlier, but thousands of years ago.

He was named Ötzi, after the Ötztal valleys, and today he is the most studied natural mummy in the world. He is kept in Bolzano, in South Tyrol, in the Archaeological Museum, in a cold, damp cell that imitates the ice. Official surveys showed that the body lay in Italian territory, about ninety metres from the border with Austria.

A man of the Copper Age

Ötzi lived about 5,300 years ago, around 3300 BC. He was about forty-five years old, 1.6 metres tall and weighed around fifty kilos. He wore clothes of goat, sheep and deer skin, a cloak of plaited grass, shoes stuffed with hay and a bearskin cap. With him he had a bow not yet finished, a quiver with arrows, a flint dagger, a birch-bark container for carrying embers and a small kit for repairing objects. On his body he had sixty-one tattoos, lines and crosses at points where he perhaps felt pain in his joints. In his shoulder there was an arrowhead, which probably caused his death: it was discovered in 2001 with an X-ray.

But the object that interests us is another: an axe. The handle was of yew wood, about sixty centimetres long, and at the top, set in place, tied with strips of leather and fixed with birch pitch, was a copper blade a little under ten centimetres long. The copper is over 99 per cent pure. That axe was a valuable object, a kind of symbol of prestige, as well as a tool for felling trees. Ötzi was a man who belonged to a world in which metals had by then entered life.

Copper: the first metal

Copper is one of the few metals found in nature even in pure form, in greenish and reddish nuggets. The first people who noticed it treated it like a stone, and for thousands of years they hammered it with a rock to make pins, beads and small jewellery. This is called cold working, and it is attested as early as about 9,000 years ago in Anatolia. A second step, much more important, was to discover that the metal could be extracted from ores with fire and melted. Copper melts at about 1,085 degrees: it takes a very hot fire, fed by charcoal and by the blowing of reeds or bellows.

The first secure evidence for copper smelting comes from the Balkans. At Belovode, in Serbia, a team of archaeologists led by Miljana Radivojević found slag and small drops of copper, dating to about 7,000 years ago, that is, to about 5000 BC. It was the Vinča culture, whose villages had big houses, decorated pots and figurines. Other places, such as Anatolia and Iran, may have known smelting at the same time or even earlier, and scholars argue about it.

The period in which copper was used in an important way is called the Copper Age, or Eneolithic (“stone and copper”), or Chalcolithic. It begins at different times in each region: in the Balkans around 5000 BC; in Italy, especially in the north, in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, with cultures such as Remedello, in Lombardy.

Ötzi's copper

In 2017 a group of researchers at the University of Padua, led by the mineralogist Gilberto Artioli, analysed the blade of Ötzi's axe, measuring the composition of tiny amounts of lead contained in the metal. The conclusion is surprising: the copper comes from southern Tuscany, hundreds of kilometres to the south, beyond the Apennines and the Po Plain. So in 3300 BC metal was already travelling over great distances, and this tells us that there were networks of exchange between distant peoples. It may be that the blade was melted and hammered closer to home, but the basic ingredient came from the south.