Istwa Nou

Copper was in use before anyone learned to smelt it. It occurs here and there as native copper, relatively pure pieces sitting inside the ore, and those can be hammered cold into shape. People did this in several parts of Africa and Eurasia, and the makers of the Old Copper Complex around the North American Great Lakes were doing it six thousand years ago. Getting metal out of ore is a different problem. It needs sustained high temperature under control, and in every region where it happened, smelting arrived only after ceramic technology was already known there. The kiln comes first and the furnace follows. That dependency has a consequence worth stating plainly. Ceramics were invented independently in Africa, among the oldest anywhere, by communities in the Sahara. The technology that made a fired pot possible is the technology that eventually made a smelter possible. Bronze and iron both rest on a foundation laid by potters.