arsenical copper

The population of the site manufactured arsenical copper and copper goods.

Initially the manufacture of arsenical copper was accidental.

Arsenical copper use was therefore very shortlived in Britain, compared with Egypt.

Common laborers only had arsenical copper objects.

Arsenical copper is one such limited research topic with some experimental work done by Pollard, Thomas, and Williams.

Arsenical coppers were dominating the record, while copper and tin-bronzes were represented to a rather limited degree.

Composition and Structure Where analysed the copper is of very high purity although earlier examples are sometimes of arsenical copper .

Oetzti', the 5,000-year-old mummified man found recently high in the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border was found with many implements including an excellent arsenical copper axe.

Tin bronze had almost completely superseded arsenical copper by the end of the second millennium BC although the scale of this change varied considerably throughout the Old World.

It appears that the closest equivalent goes by the name of arsenical copper, being defined as copper with under 0.5 wt% As, below the accepted percentage in archaeological artefacts.

The greatness of Middle Sican metallurgy was the large scale smelting and diverse use of arsenical copper, which was more ductile and corrosion-resistant than pure copper.

The advent of copper began much later, in the middle of the third millennium BC; whilst arsenical copper was used, it was replaced by tin bronze at a much earlier date.

In fact, the tools turn out to be either simply copper or arsenical copper (none are made of bronze), whereas weapons are never made of copper alone and most are tin bronze.

The early stages of the culture occupied locations not far from mountain ranges, where copper deposits were located, because of their main invention: making tools from arsenical copper in series reusing double, two-part moulds.

As with arsenical copper, there were difficulties in the manufacture of brass, because zinc metal is also highly reactive and volatile and was not isolated in quantity until the fifteenth century AD in India.

Similar objects made of arsenical coppers and of tin bronze were found in the same geographic region and identical objects with similar metal composition were found in distant areas like Palestine and Upper Egypt.

One example of the latter is Basque country in northern Spain, where splendid large dolmens are present along the Ebro river, but metal is rather infrequent, and when it does appear between the trapping, it is more often bronze or arsenical copper than copper (Cava 1984).

In the later 20th century it was found that arsenical coppers had been more widely used in antiquity than had been previously realised, and it has been proposed that discoveries made by smelting ores like tennantite were significant steps in the progress towards the Bronze Age.