Archaeologists discover humanity’s 1st copper-smelting workshop in Palestine

Occupied Palestine (QNN)- Archaeologists have excavated a Chalcolithic-period (5th millennium BCE) copper-smelting workshop at a site in Bir Al Sabe’ southern historic Palestine.
The excavation, carried out by Israeli archaeologists, revealed evidence for domestic production from the Chalcolithic period, about 6,500 years ago.
The finds include a small workshop for smelting copper with shards of a furnace — a small installation made of tin in which copper ore was smelted — as well as a lot of copper slag.
Typological and chemical analyses revealed a two-stage technology: furnace-based primary smelting followed by melting/refining in crucibles.
A lead isotope analysis indicated that the ore originated exclusively from Wadi Faynan, more than 100 km away in southern Jordan.
Professor Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist in the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at Tel Aviv University added that the archeology of Palestine shows evidence of the Ghassulian culture, which spanned the region between southern Palestine and southern Lebanon.
The Ghassulian culture was discovered in Tulaylāt al-Ghassūl in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea in Jordan. It correlates closely with the Amratian of Egypt and also seems to have affinities with early Minoan materials in Crete.