The Copper Age
Metal tools and ornaments spread, but stone still does most of the work.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.2 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Between roughly 4500 and 3300 BCE copper is worked across the Balkans, the Near East and Iran, producing axes, chisels, ornaments and the extraordinary lost-wax castings of the Nahal Mishmar hoard. Pure copper is too soft to displace flint for cutting edges, so the period is genuinely transitional — the significance is less the tools than the social consequences of a valuable substance that only specialists can make.