How it began
Belovode is a Vinca culture settlement in eastern Serbia. Excavations there produced the earliest direct evidence for copper smelting found so far. The first smelting event documented at the site dates to about 5000 BCE, roughly 7,000 years ago, which the excavators call the earliest securely dated record of extractive metallurgy anywhere. Smelting activity at Belovode spans from about 5000 to about 4650 BCE. The Vinca culture was a prehistoric society on the territory of present-day Serbia.
Before it existed
In southeastern Europe the first objects made from the copper minerals malachite and azurite appear around the late 7th and early 6th millennium BCE. These green and blue minerals were processed for beads long before anyone extracted metal from them. Eastern Serbian communities were also mining copper ore, and the peak of this first stage of mining and extraction falls between 5500 and 4500 BCE.
How it works
Smelting turns copper ore into metal by heating it until the copper separates from the rock. The evidence at Belovode consists of slag droplets rich in the elements typical of the waste rock, found together with molten copper metal. These residues show that ore was being reduced to metal on the site, at the same time as the first cast copper objects emerged in the region.
What lasted
The results were published in 2010 in the Journal of Archaeological Science under the title On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new evidence from Europe. They showed that Late Neolithic communities of the Vinca culture were not only mining but also extracting copper. A later project, published in 2021 in The Rise of Metallurgy in Eurasia, confirmed smelting at Belovode as early as the 49th century BCE. Europe's oldest metallurgy is now placed in the Balkans, with a boom in the mid 5th millennium BCE.
