Credited to Serbia. Tin bronze was long believed to have first appeared in the Near East in the early 3rd millennium BCE. The 2013 study argues for a separate, earlier European origin, and its authors note that the technology was then lost in Serbia.
How it began
Plocnik is a Vinca culture site in the Prokuplje area of the Toplica District in Serbia. A settlement of about 120 hectares stood there from 5500 BCE until fire destroyed it around 4700 BCE. Excavations recovered a piece of tin bronze foil from an occupation layer of the mid 5th millennium BCE, dated to about 4650 BCE. It lay in the corner of a dwelling among pottery sherds, close to the oven. The Vinca culture was a prehistoric society on the territory of present-day Serbia.
Before it existed
The earliest tin bronze artifacts in Eurasia were generally believed to have appeared in the Near East in the early 3rd millennium BCE. Metalworkers in the Balkans of the 5th millennium were smelting copper, and the Plocnik site itself yielded a copper workshop with a furnace and copper tools. A copper axe found there in 2008 was dated to 5500 BCE.
How it works
Tin bronze is copper alloyed with tin. The Plocnik foil contains 11.7 percent tin. Working bronze with more than 8 percent tin requires annealing at 500 to 800 degrees Celsius, which shows that such temperatures were already reached. The researchers concluded that the alloy was produced from complex ores carrying both copper and tin. They called these tainted ores because of their stained look compared with the pure green minerals used for beads.
What lasted
A study in the journal Antiquity in December 2013, by Miljana Radivojevic, Thilo Rehren and colleagues, reported the foil as the oldest known tin bronze. It also reanalyzed 14 other early tin bronze objects from Serbia and Bulgaria dated before 4000 BCE. The authors argued that tin bronze was made in Europe some 1,500 years before the first Near Eastern examples. They also noted that the technology seems to have been lost afterward in Serbia, where the next metal horizon dates to the 3rd millennium BCE.
Where it stands today
The site was first found during railway construction in 1927 and was investigated only sporadically for decades. The Prokuplje Museum and the National Museum of Serbia began systematic excavations in 1996. The foil remains the key find in the debate over where and when tin bronze began.
