IAMS Projects: Past, Present and Future
In the Sinai Peninsula and in the Eastern Desert of Egypt
Already in 1956 Beno Rothenberg undertook a survey of South Sinai, the first of its kind in modern times, which was published in his best-selling volume God's Wilderness (Thames and Hudson, London 1961). Many years later, in the 1970s, IAMS returned to Sinai with an international group of scientists, mainly concerned with ancient mining and metallurgy. To establish the historical background of the mining activities in the Sinai, the IAMS expedition explored almost the whole of the peninsula, creating a totally new history of this fascinating terrain of immense significance. Several excavations established that Sinai, previously considered a desert with only minor mining of turquoise, was in fact a very important Egyptian mining centre, which had begun in early Predynastic days (6000-3000 BC) with small-scale mining of 'native copper' and reached its peak in the New Kingdom as a major Egyptian copper industry. The book Sinai, Pharaohs, Miners, Pilgrims and Soldiers (Bern 1979), edited by Beno Rothenberg, contains the first summing up of the Sinai project and quickly became an archaeological best-seller that was translated into several languages.
With the leading participation of Professor H. G. Bachmann (Institute of Archaeology, UCL and University of Frankfurt am Main) detailed metallurgical studies have been carried out on the Sinai finds by Israeli and IAMS scientists. This project has produced the first evidence of Late Pottery Neolithic copper smelting (6th millennium BC) near the mines of Southern Sinai, as well as of sophisticated copper production by the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom (3rd millennium BC).
Following the First International Conference on Archaeo-Metallurgy in Cairo in 1995, initiated and sponsored by IAMS, the Egyptian Authorities decided to set up an Egyptian Centre of Archaeo-Metallurgical Research. As its core programme and starting project, systematic field research will be undertaken in the mining region of the Eastern Desert of Egypt, with members of IAMS as senior participants. Professors C. Tim Shaw and Beno Rothenberg took part on behalf of IAMS in a recent field survey of ancient gold, tin, copper and emerald mining sites in the region of Mersa Alam in order to select suitable sites for major systematic field research (cf. iams journal No. 20, 1998). Since very little of such excavations have previously been undertaken in Egypt, this research project is expected to provide vital information on the development in ancient Egypt of the sophisticated Egyptian metallurgy used by the Egyptian mining expeditions to Sinai and the Arabah (Timna) since Early Dynastic times. Systematic archaeo-metallurgical research in the field and in the museums of Egypt will add significally to a better understanding of Egypt's widespread and sophisticated use of metal for chariots, arms and jewelry, and contribute essential knowledge to the preservation of Egypt's cultural heritage.
The Prehistory of Copper: Culture-historical and Process-technological Studies of the Earliest Steps in Metallurgy
Further excavations at Timna took place in the 1980s and early 1990s in order to complete and conclude the investigation of the mines and smelters of the south-western Arabah. Due to IAMS' insistence on detailed field evidence and sophisticated archaeo-metallurgical studies of the finds, it has recently been established that copper smelting in Timna had already started in the 6th millennium BC, in the Late Pottery Neolithic period, and not, as previously assumed, in the 5th millennium BC, the Chalcolithic period. This exciting discovery, extending the history of metallurgy by more than a thousand years, has triggered off a new IAMS research programme into the first, prehistoric steps towards fully-developed copper metallurgy (cf. iams journal No. 19, 1995).
Based on our excavation of four prehistoric key sites in the Arabah, it has been possible to identify an indigenous population in the arid desert region of the southern Levant, with their own kind and speed of metallurgical development from the 6th to the 3rd millennium BC. Very detailed scientific investigations of the smelting debris identified the decisive changes of process parameters and furnace technology through three thousand years of gradual metallurgical progress. These investigations created a new prehistory of copper, shown against the background of the excavated archaeological evidence of correlated culture changes and divisions. The results of these investigations provide a unique model applicable to metallurgical developments in many other parts of the ancient world.
Metal, Man and History
Recent preliminary studies have shown that major stimulation by new technologies was not only followed by social and geo-political changes, but also by the formation of new intellectual ideas, often leading to cultural transitions. A data base is being created to correlate between metal-based technological and intellectual changes, located in many countries and cultures, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkan Peninsula, the Aegean and the Far East. This data base is providing the material for a new way of looking at techno-historical developments and their interface with the development of human potentials in the widest sense of this concept.
Metal and Metallurgy in the Bible and in the Talmudic Literature
Initiated by the eminent Biblical scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, famous for his modern translations and commentary of the Talmud, and sponsored by Dr.h.c. Felix Posen, members of IAMS and the Department of History at Southampton University are collaborating in a unique project dealing with metal and metallurgy in the Biblical and Talmudic literature. The Jewish corpus was compiled over a period of more than thousand years, from about 500 BC to Early Islamic times in the seventh century AD, and encompasses much of what was known about materials and technology to learned men of that era. This information is particularly significant as some of the Rabbis were in fact themselves professional metal workers. This wealth of information remained almost completely unnoticed by modern science and historians of science. The 'Metal in the Bible and Talmud' Project is an interdisciplinary undertaking to develop an interface between the vast Biblical and Talmudic sources and modern archaeological and, especially, archaeo-metallurgical knowledge. Its aim is the creation of a comprehensive picture of the use of metal, metal technology and metal-related aspects of daily life in this formative era of Jewish history, and to provide important additional data for the history of metal and metallurgical technology in the Near East. If we consider that we are in fact dealing with significant information from one of the most formative periods of the Western World, the systematic study of this untapped ancient source promises to produce a wealth of new information for archaeo-metallurgy and culture-history in general.IAMS returns to Timna: Excavations in the 5th-4th millennium BC copper mines.
In the 70th, IAMS excavated, in collaboration with the German Mining Museum Bochum, several ancient copper mines in the Timna Valley (Conrad & Rothenberg, ed., Antikes Kupfer im Timna Tal, Bochum 1980). Recently IAMS decided to carry out additional excavations in the protohistoric (Chalcolithic) copper mines of Timna, in order to clarify mining-technological problems left open by the previous excavations of the 70th. The first season took place March-June 2001 and produced essential evidence for the earliest underground, shaft-gallery, mining in the Levant.