The Currency in Copper

Sight

AS THE FIRST BLUSH OF DAYLIGHT illuminates a craggy trail through southern Jordan’s Faynan District, University of California, San Diego archaeologist Thomas Levy dismounts his donkey and starts chipping away at a brilliant, cerulean-blue vein in the hillside. During his eight-day journey along an ancient trade route through the deserts of Jordan and Israel, the ubiquitous copper ore appeared to Levy much as it must have to the inhabitants of the region more than 6,000 years ago, during the Chalcolithic period, or Copper Age (4500 to 3600 B.C.). Unlike Levy and his team of international scientists, the hunter-gatherers had no way of knowing that the vibrant stone would usher in the world’s first recorded era of social inequality.

An array of prehistoric copper artifacts unearthed along the route and elsewhere in the Negev Desert are displayed at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park during “Journey to the Copper Age: Pre-Biblical Archaeology in the Holy Hand.” Opening June 10, the exhibit includes 60 photographs from National Geographic photographer Kenneth Garrett, who joined the 1997 excursion. The majority of artifacts, on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, are being shown for the first time outside Israel. The display coincides with the San Diego National History Museum’s much-anticipated Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition, opening June 29.

Many of these ornate copper objects were discovered in 1961 at the Cave of the Treasure, in the Judean Desert. Israeli archaeologists stumbled upon the cave and its more than 400 crowns, scepters and mace heads while searching for additional scrolls.

“As always happens with archaeology, during the last day of the expedition, they moved a boulder and found this amazing hoard of copper,” Levy says.

An era of pivotal human innovation and socioeconomic change, the Copper Age saw the beginning of metallurgy, the rise of chiefdoms, the first temples and cemeteries and a population explosion in the Negev region, today’s Judeo-Christian holy land. During the 95-mile expedition, an experimental archaeology program funded by the National Geographic Society, Levy and his team of German, Israeli and Jordanian researchers used primitive tools to re-create conditions present during the Copper Age.

“We took the copper ore that we mined in Jordan in our saddlebags, and when we got to the endpoint, the village of Shiqmim, we did smelting experiments to see exactly how the Chalcolithic people did it,” Levy says. “We wanted to get almost a measure of the energy that went into this prehistoric metal production. Now that we know how long it takes to produce 10 grams of copper from smelting, what does that mean in terms of the value of a prehistoric metal ax from this period that weighed 200 or 250 grams?”

Though Garrett was focused on capturing the image on film, he was amazed at the ingenuity of Chalcolithic society and the amount of time spent extracting such a paltry amount for decorative use. “It’s unfathomable how they could produce such wealth,” Garrett says. “For us to have created a copper ax would have taken a week. I would say that these people 6,000 years ago had to be terribly clever——maybe more clever than we.”

As part of a monthly educational series coinciding with the exhibit, experts from the German Mining Museums and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan will visit the Museum of Man to demonstrate the smelting process with Jordanian ore. For a schedule, contact the Museum of Man at 619-239-2001.

“Journey to the Copper Age: Pre-Biblical Archaeology in the Holy Hand” is on display until December 31. More information: museumofman.org.

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