Glossary Metals, materials and technology
Native copper
Copper that occurs naturally as metal in the ground and can be shaped by hammering, with no smelting needed.
Native copper was the first metal people anywhere learned to work. It needs no furnace: lumps are hammered into shape and annealed, that is, reheated to a few hundred degrees to stop the metal turning brittle. The craft has more in common with working stone than with smelting.
The first metal objects on Cyprus, from the Middle Chalcolithic around 3400 BCE, are thought to be of native copper: about eighteen small chisels, awls, pins, a hook and spiral ornaments, all from the south-west around Paphos. Whether any of them is smelted metal has been argued for decades, and recent isotope work suggests that some were imported from Anatolia. See Chalcolithic Cyprus.
Full entry: Copper Metallurgy in Ancient Cyprus
Related terms
- Smelting
Heating ore with a fuel such as charcoal until the metal separates from the rock, leaving a waste called slag behind.
- Ore
Rock containing enough metal to be worth mining and smelting; Cypriot copper ore is mostly chalcopyrite, a copper-iron sulphide.
- Picrolite
A soft blue-green stone, a variety of serpentinite from the Troodos, carved into pendants, beads and figurines in prehistoric Cyprus.