| Abstract: |
The preliminary work presented here concentrates on examining lead isotope evidence for copper artefacts from the necropolis of Varna and the contemporary site of Dolnoslav near Plovdiv, in relation to the lead isotope characteristics of Bulgarian metal deposits and archaeological cemetery analysis. Similar comparisons are made for objects from a few other Eneolithic sites relatively near the mine of Ai Bunar. It is aimed at laying the foundations for attempting to begin to answer such questions as: What were the geographical range of the contacts with the Varna cemetery and the Dolnoslav site? Do the metals in a particular grave at Varna come from the same source, but metals in different graves have a different origin? Are the sources of metals in graves with skeletons different from those without skeletons? Where were located the ore sources used for the manufacture of metal objects in the Varna graves and the Dolnoslav site? Are they local, or Pontic and/or Aegean? What was the role of Ai Bunar, or of the Serbian Eneolithic copper mines of Rudna Glava or Rudnik? Can the Varna artefacts be linked with Eneolithic artefacts at other sites across Bulgaria, which might bear on the hypothesis that Varna was the central cult cemetery for a wider chiefdom society? What were the trading links between the different Eneolithic societies represented by the tell sites in Bulgaria? Were there links with the Eneolithic societies in Serbia? Apart from these particular questions, the question is addressed of whether the production and use of copper in the Balkans was indeed an indigenous development, as suggested by Renfrew from radiocarbon dating, and whether the old diffusionist argument can indeed be altogether discarded that in Europe metallurgy arrived in some sense from the Near East. In the last resort, it is of course difficult to exclude diffusion, since diffusion can be of the ideas of mining, smelting and metallurgy rather than of actual metal or metal artefacts. Two factors are in favour of local developments in the Eneolithic Balkans. One is the artefacts, coupled with their manufacture by casting and forging with a shaft-hole being formed around a mould. Second, strong support for an indigenous development, in the restricted sense of the mining of local ores, was provided by the discovery of the Eneolithic copper mines at Ai Bunar in Bulgaria, at Rudna Glava and Rudnik (Mali Sturac) in Serbia. Exploitation of these mines dates back to at least the middle of the fifth millennium BC. It is tempting to relate the Eneolithic copper artefacts to one or the other of these undoubted Eneolithic copper ore mines, and this is in fact common practice. Chernykh, for example, distinguishes three metallurgical provinces in southeastern Europe and relates them, chiefly via his chemical groups, to the production centres of Rudna Glava, Ai Bunar and an unknown mining centre in the Carpathian Mountains. From her typological study of Eneolithic axes and chisels, Todorova comes to similar conclusions, but there is an apparent difficulty. This is that there is a puzzling lack of published evidence for Eneolithic extractive metallurgy in the form of copper slags, either at the sites of the Eneolithic mines themselves or in Eneolithic settlements in their vicinity. This seems curious, in view of the large number or Eneolithic massive implements found in the Balkans, and because the chemical analyses of copper ores from Ai Bunar and Rudna Glava show them to be impure enough so that slags would have to be formed in the process of smelting copper metal from them. The ores from Ai Bunar contain both oxidized and sulphidic copper minerals so that, if they were indeed smelted to produce copper metal in the Eneolithic, one may have here some of the earliest smelting of at least partly sulphidic ores in the world. The lack of finds in Bulgaria of Eneolithic copper slags on the scale commensurate with the number of massive Eneolithic copper artefacts may, of course, merely be due to lack of a sufficient search for them by archaeologists away from settlements and mines.
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