A 7,000-year-old copper awl unearthed at the archaeological site of Tel Tsaf, Israel, is the earliest metal artifact found to date in the Middle East, suggesting that cast metal technology was introduced to the region centuries earlier than previously thought.
The 7,000-year-old metal awl from Tel Tsaf upon discovery. Image credit: Yosef Garfinkel.
First documented in the 1950s, Tel Tsaf is a Middle Chalcolithic village (5200-4700 BC) located near Beth-Shean in the central Jordan Valley of Israel.
Since the first scientific excavations, it has been apparent that Tel Tsaf represents one of the most important archeological sites in the region.
Four mud-brick architectural complexes were unearthed at the site; each consists of a closed courtyard with rectilinear and rounded rooms, silos and many cooking facilities.
The silos reached a storage capacity estimated at 15–30 tons of grain, a clear indication of the accumulation of surpluses on a scale unprecedented in the ancient Near East.
Archaeologists also discovered rich assemblages of painted pottery, over 2,500 beads made of ostrich egg-shell, about 100 stone beads, obsidian items originating in Anatolia or Armenia, four Ubaid pottery shards imported from either north Syria or Mesopotamia, and shells from the Nile River in Egypt.
But the most important find to date is a metal awl dating to about 5000 BC. It was unearthed by a team of archaeologists headed by Prof Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology.
“The metal object is an elongated pin made of cast copper, with a rounded cross-section,” Prof Garfinkel and his colleagues wrote in a paper published in the journal PloS ONE.
The awl is 41 mm long with the tip diameter of 1 mm and a maximum diameter of 5 mm.
“The color of the outside is green due to oxidization and corrosion, while the core is reddish.”
“The narrower tip bears signs of rotational movement and remains of a wooden handle were noted on the base, on the opposite end.”
“The awl is totally corroded with no original metal left. Due to the corroded state of this object we could not observe the original microstructure; no rare remains of the original production process visible, nor the original relative quantities of the various elements preserved.”
The chemical composition of the corroded metal was analyzed by a portable energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence analyzer.
“The results show copper corrosion with 6 % tin (Sn) and 0.8 % arsenic (As) and low traces of lead (Pb) and Iron (Fe).”
“The ratios between elements are not as they were in the original metal and may have been altered during the corrosion process.”
Prof Garfinkel and his colleagues wrote: “the appearance of tin, even if highly enriched in the corrosion process, raises important questions.”
“Until now, copper items of such chemical composition have not been found in the Late Chalcolithic or the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant, nor does the metal composition of this object, which includes tin, fit the known compositions of local native copper.”
“In fact, items with similar chemistry have been documented in the southern Levant up to now only from the Middle Bronze Age, the 2nd millennium BC and later periods.”
“Thus, not only does the Tel Tsaf awl predate all known metals in the southern Levant by several centuries, it also predates all known tin bronze items in this region by about 3,000 years.”
But this is not the only reason the Tel Tsaf awl is significant.
The results of the chemical analysis indicate that the metal was exported from a distant source, probably in the Caucasus – about 1,000 km from Tel Tsaf.
Prof Garfinkel said: “while the long-distance commercial ties maintained by village communities in the region were already known from even earlier periods, the import of a new technology combined with the processing of a new raw material coming from such a distant location is unique to Tel Tsaf and provides additional evidence of the importance of this site in the ancient world.”
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Garfinkel Y et al. 2014. The Beginning of Metallurgy in the Southern Levant: A Late 6th Millennium CalBC Copper Awl from Tel Tsaf, Israel. PLoS ONE 9 (3): e92591; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092591
