Belovode: among the world's earliest secure copper-smelting sites, c. 4900 BC

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Key facts

• University of Belgrade archaeometallurgist Miljana Radivojević and colleagues investigated Belovode and Pločnik, recovering copper slag, malachite beads and metal droplets in Vinča-period contexts. The slag and droplets are the direct evidence for smelting.
• The results appeared in the 2010 Antiquity article "On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new insights from western Serbia" and were revisited in the 2021 monograph "The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia," not a 2010 Journal of Archaeological Science paper.
• Belovode's securely dated smelting evidence dates to the 49th century BC, or c. 4900 BC. It is Europe's earliest known secure evidence and one of the world's earliest known examples.
• The video argues that miners favoured black and green copper ores for aesthetic reasons; that motive is not an established archaeological finding.
• Rudna Glava—not "Rudnik Glava"—was among the earliest known copper mines and was exploited on a substantial scale.
• The tin-bronze foil from Pločnik dates to c. 4650 BC, over 1,000 years before the conventional European Bronze Age. Early tin-bronze production at the site was short-lived.
• Early copper was chiefly used for ornaments and did not displace stone tools; the video's reading of the ornaments as status display is an interpretation.

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