A clue from the locals led archaeologists from Frankfurt to an area near the city of Ibra in Oman, where they found several settlements. Irini Bizeveld and her colleague, PhD student Jonas Kluge, were in the country in the eastern Arabian Peninsula for six weeks for field research led by the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism in northern Sharqiya province of Oman.
They documented the buildings they could see and then dug test pits in the ground. Their aim was to date the settlement using every charcoal find they could find there. Just then, something green appeared: a rusted-out piece of copper consisting of three separate ingots in the shape of a round cone.
The advisor of two doctoral students, Associate Professor Dr. “Findings like this are extremely rare,” says Stephanie Doepper. Presumably, the residents accidentally dropped the 1.7-pound find—for whatever reason—when they left the settlement.
The settlement described by Bizeveld and Kluge is dated to the Early Bronze Age (approximately 2600-2000 BC). During this period, the territory of modern Oman was one of the most important copper producers for the Indus culture in modern Pakistan and India, as well as ancient Mesopotamia in modern Iraq. Here, however, they began mining copper ore on a larger scale.
Copper was a desirable commodity, cast in ingots, and this is confirmed by cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia. Because copper ingots are often further processed to make tools and other objects, they are rarely found during archaeological excavations. Even more surprising was the discovery of several such ingots at an Early Bronze Age settlement.
Copper ingots have a flat-convex shape of that time, created by pouring molten copper into small clay crucibles. Thanks to the discovery of copper ingots, it is possible to learn more about Oman’s role in interregional trade relations in the Early Bronze Age and the metalworking technologies already known at that time.
Smelting copper requires a large amount of combustible material, and this was probably a big problem in an arid, sparsely vegetated region like Oman. How people in the Early Bronze Age coped with their limited resources and whether it was possible to use them sustainably are questions that need to be answered later in the project.
Several pieces of ‘black jars’ discovered there, as well as large Indus culture storage vessels confirm that the newly discovered village was in close shopping and contact with the Indian subcontinent. Even a small, highly rural settlement in central Oman seems to be part of a system of interregional trade and exchange. Source
Source: Port Altele
