7000 Year Old Awl

[Sabine1]

Not specifically guaranteed to be a leatherworker but the skill was probably part of her life. S1

http://www.timesofisrael.com/oldest-metal-in-middle-east-found-in-israeli-dig/

I tried to post the article but it wouldn't allow me to paste here for some reason. Nice article with good picture of a copper awl. S1

[shtoink]

That was quite the read and pretty elated that you shared it. It seems that we have long since had the need to controllably poke holes in leather to make things.

The question I had about the copper was how common it was to find it in nugget form or had we discovered and started smelting ore that early on?

[rawcustom]

Butte Montana was a huge copper mining town and now there is an enormous pit where a mountain once stood. From accounts I read and heard was that back before we dug it all out, the copper was so plentiful and common that chunks were strewn about all over the mountain side. I bet in the right areas enough copper for an awl was very likely to be found on the surface.

[TexasJack]

Part of the article:

"...Prof. Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found the awl in the sealed grave of an approximately 40-year-old woman that was dug inside a grain silo and covered with several large stones. Just 4 centimeters long and 1 millimeter thick at the tip, the awl was set in a wooden handle. Around the woman’s waist was a belt made of 1,668 ostrich-egg shell beads."

That's some serious bead work!!

[TexasJack]

Copper is one of the seven "metals of antiquity" that have been used for many, many years. (The others are gold, lead, silver, tin, iron, and mercury.) Gold is the oldest, dating back to 6,000 BC, with the rest being discovered and used between that time and 750 BC.

From "History of Metals": "...Initially copper was chipped into small pieces from the main mass. The small pieces were hammered and ground in a manner similar to the techniques used for bones and stones. However, when copper was hammered it became brittle and would easily break. The solution to this problem was to anneal the copper. This discovery was probably made when pieces were dropped in camp fires and then hammered. By 5,000 BC copper sheet was being made."