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By Ed Stiles, College of Engineering
April 23, 2008

Students in Pamela Vandiver’s class, “Materials Science of Art and Archaeology,” recently traveled back to the Bronze Age by reproducing what would have been a cutting-edge technology 5,000 years ago.

During the process, they gained direct, hands-on experience with copper smelting and casting as it was practiced in the Near East.

Setting up the smelter, making a pair of hand-operated bellows and creating a pottery crucible was a lot of work for one class, but well worth the effort, says Vandiver, a professor of materials science and engineering at The University of Arizona.

“A chapter in a book might put students to sleep,” Vandiver said. “But actually working with the tools and processes that people used thousands of years ago doesn’t put them to sleep, and they won't forget the experience."

This seemed likely as two students sat on the ground operating the hand bellows, while others shaped a piece of copper with a hammer and then annealed it.

Meanwhile, everyone felt the heat from the charcoal-fired furnace as a very non-Bronze-Age electric blower stoked the flames to smelting temperatures outside the Mines building on the UA campus.

The Bronze Age is just one of several eras students visit during the course, which Vandiver has offered for the past four spring semesters. “I conduct these labs so students can really get an idea of materials transformations,” Vandiver said. “In an earlier lab, they used copper carbonate as a pigment for Medieval-style, egg tempera panel painting. Now they will actually see copper metal produced from the same copper carbonate and how that copper can be melted and cast.”

The students also learn that although the technology is 5,000 years old, it's complex, requiring large-scale specialization and cooperation to go from mining to a finished necklace, for instance.

“At one archaeological site I worked on in Iraq, there was a necklace with a beautiful agate bead surrounded by a metal setting,” Vandiver said. “The loop broke off this necklace and it was soldered on with some of the worst soldering I've ever seen – just bumpy and flowing all over the place. But the necklace was polished, worn and in an important, elite person’s grave. So there is no question that great value was placed on the products of this kind of smelting and casting technology.”

Other valuable objects made by this process would have included chisels, knives, axes and hammers. Part of the reason these objects had such value is that copper ore deposits were not widespread, she said.

Consequently, metal production was localized, and the objects produced became valuable trade goods as they spread to various parts of the then-known world, where no local metals industry existed.

Compared with some technologies studied in Vandiver's class, Bronze-Age smelting and casting is positively modern. The class starts with Paleolithic-Age flint flaking, a technology that humans living a million years ago would have recognized.

The class also makes stops at several other points in history to study technologies such as Neolithic techniques for making imitation precious stones, and egg tempera panel painting as it was practiced during the European Middle Ages.

“I want students to see how materials transformations occurred and to then understand the underlying science behind what were exciting technologies for their times,” she said. “These were advancements that changed society through the exploitation of materials. Ultimately, I hope students learn to see the differences among what was possible with Paleolithic, Neolithic and Urban States technologies.

“This experience gives non-engineering majors a long-term perspective about technology, along with some of the analytical approaches and tools needed to investigate current science and engineering.”