Word: coppers
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...wine and pottery with the Greek mainland and Crete. In Crete fashionable women sported ankle-length dresses, with necklines low enough to make Madonna blush. (The art of weaving originated more than a millennium earlier.) And in the Balkans metallurgists were hard at work crafting elaborate tools of lead, copper and iron and spectacular ornaments of gold...
While the Neolithic period was just flowering in Europe, it had long since come and gone in the Middle and Near East, and a transitional epoch, known as the Chalcolithic (copper and stone) period was approaching its zenith. The first Chalcolithic culture appeared suddenly -- and mysteriously -- in the Near East in about 4000 B.C. and quickly spread toward the Indus River basin and the Mediterranean...
...transportation improved, thanks to the wheel, sailing ships and the domestication of donkeys, connections between far-flung villages and towns expanded dramatically. A flourishing international trade developed in copper ore, gold, ivory, grain, olive oil, wine and other wares. Explains anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara: "This was the beginning of a global economy...
Chalcolithic smiths had determined that naturally occurring arsenic-laced copper was shinier and easier to work than the unalloyed metal. The discovery contributed to the extraordinary beauty of their ceremonial objects, jewelry and vessels, exemplified by the Judean desert treasures -- a cache of objects found in a cave in 1961. "Their art was versatile, so beautiful, so different from anything that came before or after," says Miriam Tadmor, senior curator at Jerusalem's Israel Museum. Indeed, in the opinion of her colleague Osnat Misch, "the culture of the later Bronze Age was inferior aesthetically...
...beginning to cultivate wild plants, relying mostly on nuts, grasses, fish, deer and migrating waterfowl, while people across Europe, Africa and Asia were already accomplished farmers. But elsewhere in the U.S. Midwest, populations of hunter-gatherers had staked out territories and built an extensive trading network that dealt in copper, hematite, seashells, jasper and other minerals. Fishing societies along the Pacific Coast were also becoming more complex, as natives took to the sea to hunt seals, whales and other marine mammals...