Dear Sheppard,
I do not have the Los Millares data in my head but I have worked with
other Spanish contemporary material. The answer to your question may
just be that there is no significant difference in dates. The ores being
exploited at one site I have looked at, Almizaraque, could have yielded
both arsenical copper and copper with relatively low impurities, so the
two could well be contemporary.
Looking at the Los Millares data in Rovira Llorens et al., 1997: "Las
primeras Etapas Metalurgicas en la Peninsula Iberica: I, Analisis de
Materiales" I see the majority of analyses have at least some arsenic.
You have to remember that the arsenic content may not be just a
consequence of the ores selected and the smelting technology but also of
recycling. If that was not done under sufficiently reducing conditions,
and often it wasn't, the arsenic content would decrease each time metal
was remelted. Some lower arsenic contents will very probably be the
result of this process.
When you have collected the dates you want you may still find that there
is a period at Los Millares when only rather pure copper was used, but
there is no particular reason why there should be other than past,
rather evolutionary approaches to the development of metallurgy. By the
time metallurgy arrived in the Iberian peninsula it was already old
elsewhere. The question then is how much technology was transferred
along with the basic ideas of metallurgy.
If you have not got it, you might also like to get hold of:
Delibes de Castro and Montero Ruiz, eds., 1999: "Las primeras Etapas
Metalurgicas en la Peninsula Iberica. II, Estudios Regionales"
Yours,
Peter Northover
--
Dr Peter Northover,
Materials Science-Based Archaeology Group,
Department of Materials, University of Oxford
Tel +44 (0)1865 283721; Fax +44 (0)1865 841943 Mobile +44 (0)7785 501745
e-mail [log in to unmask]
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