Copper Age

“ Reviewing all the facts attesting a Copper Age in Central Europe, Egypt, Italy, Cyprus, Troy, Scandinavia, North Asia, and other lands, he concludes that a Copper Age may have sprung up independently wherever the ore was found, as in the Ural and Altai Mountains, Italy, Spain, Britain, Cyprus, Sinai ”

“ The Egyptians were acquainted with the use of copper long before they began to manufacture bronze;479 and in many parts of the British Isles as well as of the Continent copper implements have been discovered which belonged to prehistoric times.480 But such discoveries do not necessarily prove the existence of a Copper Age: they may often be accounted for by the supposition that tin, which is far less widely distributed than copper, was temporarily wanting. In many cases implements of copper and of bronze have been met with in intimate association ”

“ Lead was found in the form of a thick wire, very pure. A silver bangle contained ninety per cent of silver, considerable copper, and an appreciable quantity of gold. Sir John Evans spoke of the evidences of a copper age preceding a bronze age, seen in North America, Ireland, Hungary, and other countries. Dr. Hildebrand said that several implements of pure copper had been found in Sweden. Prof. Boyd Dawkins thought the evidence from North America showed that the copper age was practically a side of the neolithic age. ”

“ Copper seems to have been the first metal known, and there are traces of a copper age prior to that of bronze in some of the older neolithic lake villages of Switzerland and Italy, and in very old tombs and dolmens in Hungary, France, and the south-west 173 of Spain. ”

“ The working of copper in the East has been traced back to the fourth millennium B.C., and there was also a very ancient Copper Age in the New World. It need hardly be said that where copper is scarce, as in Britain, we cannot expect to find much trace of a Copper Age. ”

“ The use of gold and silver or any metal for ornamental purposes has never been considered by archæologists as synchronous with a metal age. Indeed, in the United States there are great numbers of aboriginal cutting implements of copper, of which the U. S. National Museum possesses a collection of five or six hundred; yet they were not in sufficient number to, and they did not, supersede the use of stone as the principal material for cutting implements, and so do not establish a copper age in America. In Paleolithic times bone was largely used as material for utensils and ornaments. ”

“ In 1862 David Wilson, following Proclus and Tzetzes, declares the process of hardening and tempering copper so as to give it the edge of iron or steel, a ‘lost art.’ Markham [165] supposes that the old Peruvians hardened their copper with tin or silica; and he erroneously believes that tin is scarcely found in that section of South America.
Modern archæological discovery has suggested that in many parts of the world we must intercalate an age of virgin Copper between the so-called Stone and Bronze Periods. The first metal, as far as we know, was the stream-gold, washed by the Egyptians ”

“ Copper is the basis of so many alloys of which metallic curios are formed, that in its combination with other metals it gives the collector an almost inexhaustible field of research. It was the metal of the ancients, which in combination with tin gave them that useful metal with which to fashion weapons of offence and defence, and later, as the Bronze Age advanced, utilitarian objects of household economy. ”

“ While tin is rare throughout the world, it is very different with copper, the ores of which are found at a great number of points. The mines of Sinai, not to mention more distant ones, were celebrated in ancient Egypt. The extraction of metallic copper from its ores is also easy. Reasoning from these facts, many archaeologists have supposed that an age of pure copper, or an age in which arms and tools were made of this metal, preceded the bronze age. ”

“ Professor O. Montelius affirms (Man, v, 1905, No. 7, p. 13) that ‘copper had been used there [in Britain] for a long time’ before bronze; but British archaeologists do not bow to his authority. Pitt-Rivers (Journ. Roy. United Service Inst., xiii, 1870, p. 520) remarked that ‘it is not surprising that on the first discovery of the advantages of [adding tin to copper] ... all the old implements of copper, wherever procurable, should have been taken to the melting-pot for conversion into bronze, and we should thus be left with such scanty evidence of the existence of an age of copper’. ”

“ Copper ores are, however, very rarely found in a pure state, and the small impurities of antimony, arsenic, &c., combine in the smelting with the copper, and lend a hardness and ductibility which would enable it to be cast in closed moulds. ”

“ This alloy is very hard, and possesses qualities which make it more valuable for weapons and tools than the relatively soft metal copper. But we can hardly suppose that the first metal-workers discovered, immediately after they had learnt how to smelt metals, that a mixture of metals was more useful than a pure one. In point of fact, it is clear that in some places, at least, the age of bronze was preceded by a period when developing man used pure copper for his implements.
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Our word copper is derived from the name of the island of Cyprus, which is particularly rich in copper ores. ”

“ Collectors find the Age of Metals unfolding as they arrange their collections with orderly sequence, and thereby trace the progress of artificers throughout the periods which have intervened since the first bronze celt was moulded to the present day. [8] Although this is the Age of Iron and the numerous materials which metallurgical research and scientific skill have produced, copper, and brass in its varied forms, are still prominent, and the almost inexhaustible supply of copper with which Nature has provided us is still being drawn from. ”

“ Nowhere in this entire valley do copper implements, however, appear to have entirely replaced those of stone, the use of which was continued until quite recent times. The manufacture of copper implements doubtless extended through several centuries. The Siouan Winnebago and Dakota of Wisconsin, being nearest the source of supply, possessed of course the greatest quantity. ”

“ Copper axes were modelled at first after old stone patterns. This metal had one fatal defect, however; it would not hold an edge. Copper [Pg 141] utensils were beautiful, but generally less useful than similar ones made of stone. They were largely for display and luxury, though this may hardly be true of its use in Egypt and the Orient. In Europe it could not shake the hold of the old, established flint. When the copper ore contained impurities of antimony or zinc, the alloy was harder. Then we find a very small percentage of tin, which slowly increases. ”

“ She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read about Surrey and Yorkshire—he had held out that copper millions of times. ”

“ A white crystaline stone is also found to contain a great quantity of yellow copper. The lodes of copper ore generally lie deeper than those of tin, and its ores are mostly of the pyritous and sulphurated kinds, with more or less arsenic. “The lodes, both of tin and copper, appear most frequently to have granite for their country, and to make an angle from 60° to 76° with the horizon.” The matrices of copper ore are very numerous. Among the blue ores, there is one of an extremely fine blue earth. ”

“ After taking out a somewhat rumpled shirt, a suit of underclothes and a couple of pair of socks, Prawle said:
“Now, young gents, I’m going to show you some of the finest specimens of real virgin copper ever dug out of mother earth.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Charlie, a slight shade of disappointment in his voice, “I thought it was gold or silver quartz you had there. But copper——”
“Young man,” said Prawle, diving one hairy paw into his grip and fishing out a magnificent specimen of raw copper, “look at that and hold your breath. There is ninety per cent of copper in that hunk. Think of that! ”

“ The copper was, no doubt, recognised as a malleable rock, differing from all others in its ductility, so that it could be fashioned, with the aid of a hammer-stone, to any desired form. By this means the ancient miners of Lake Superior provided themselves with the most suitable tools for their mining operations, and were probably the manufacturers of most of the widely diffused copper implements. But for general purposes, both of industry and war, American man had to be content with the more abundant chert, hornstone, and quartzite. ”

“ It is then, in his opinion, the solution of the metal—the wear of its surface, by keeping it smooth, which prevents the adhesion of foreign matter. Whenever the copper is unequally worn, deposits will, without doubt, rest in the rough parts, or depressions in the metal, and afford a soil or bed in which sea-weeds can fix their roots, and to which zoophytes and shell-fish can adhere; but there is another cause of foulness on the protected sheathing, arising from the deposit of earthy matter upon the copper, in consequence of its electro-negative condition. ”

“ Now, we know that copper is found in the mines in a state of such comparative purity as to require very little smelting for the purpose of being brought into a state fit for use, while, on the other hand, iron in its rough state looks more like a stone than a metal, and, moreover, before it can be worked at all, must be subjected to a difficult process of smelting by means of a very powerful fire. If we look at the question only on this side, we are forced to conclude, that copper must have been found and employed before iron. ”

“ A small United-States coin is termed a “nickel.”
Fig. 411.—Native copper.
Copper is the next metal we have to notice. It has been known for centuries. It is encountered native in many places. The Cornish copper ore is the copper pyrites. The fumes of the smelting works are very injurious, containing, as they do, arsenic and sulphur. The ground near the mines is usually bare of vegetation in consequence of the “smoke.” Sheet copper is worked into many domestic utensils, and the alloy with zinc, termed Brass, is both useful and ornamental. ”

“ As has been already observed, considerable quantities of wrought, and some small fragments of unwrought native copper, have been extracted from the mounds. Axes, as we have seen, have been found, wrought from a single piece, weighing upwards of two pounds each. The metal appears, in all cases, to have been worked in a cold state. This is the more remarkable from the fact that, in some instances, the fires upon the altars were sufficiently intense to melt down the copper implements and ornaments deposited upon them. ”

“ They do not seem to have understood the art of melting copper, or even of forging it hot, but to have treated it as a kind of malleable stone, which they got in pieces out of the ground, or knocked off from the great natural blocks, and hammered into knives, chisels, axes, and ornaments. The use of native copper was by no means confined to the Mound Builders, for the European explorers found it in use for knives, ice-chisels, ornaments, etc., in the northern part of the Continent, especially among the Esquimaux and the Canadian Indians. ”

“ The Britons understood its use, no doubt finding it out by accident, just as the natives of many other countries have done. Copper, as evidenced by the marvellous Benin bronzes, was known in Central Africa long ago. The mines at Mansfield, in Germany, are the oldest in Europe, and there workers have been digging up copper for seven centuries.
The collector of old metal objects naturally takes the greater interest in well authenticated specimens known to have been fashioned in districts once famous for their copper mines. ”

“ Copper may be separated, in a state of great purity, from ANTIMONY, ARSENIC, BISMUTH, LEAD, IRON, TIN, ZINC, &c., as it exists in bell-metal, brass, bronze, gun-metal, mosaic gold, and other commercial alloys, by fusing it in a crucible for about half an hour, along with copper scales (black oxide) and ground bottle-glass, or other like flux. The pure metal is found at the bottom of the crucible, whilst the impurities are either volatilised or dissolved in the flux. The proportions for refining commercial copper are, metal, 10 parts ”

“ The richest deposits of native copper are those of Lake Superior, in North America. More frequently and more abundantly it occurs as an ore, e.g. red oxide, black oxide, green carbonate of copper or mal′achite, blue carbonate of copper, vitreous sulphide of copper, purple copper, copper pyrites, or yellow copper ore, with sulphur, antimony, or arsenic, and other metals (true grey copper ore or fah′lerz) , as an impure hydrated silicate (chrys′ocolla) , and as an impure hydrated oxychloride (atac′amite) . The most abundant and important ore is copper pyrites. ”

“ Copper by itself is so soft that it would not be of much use to man, except the experience they would gain of melting and molding. In our own country the aboriginal inhabitants were well acquainted with copper, and even knew how to mold it. Yet, except as just pointed out, it is not probable that it exerted any marked influence on their development.7 In the old world supplies of native copper are limited, and recourse must be had to the ores of copper. Now these ores, such as copper-pyrites, are nearly always of a bright color, and as such would attract the attention of primitive man. ”