7,000-year-old fortress wall uncovered in southern Turkey

[Judi Lynn]

4. Early Places With Metals: Yumuktepe

Yumuktepe is a tell or ruin mound right in the thriving city of Mersin in Southern Turkey. It raised itself by continued settlements since 7000 BC until the Middle Ages. Yumuktepe was close to the coast when the first people settled there. Now it is about a mile inland.

Yumuktepe thus is far younger than the other old settlements covered in this module (look a the time line to get an idea). Its present claim to fame is that so far it yielded the oldest smelted copper known to archeometallurgists.

I visited Yumuktepe in Sept. 2013. While I can't give you a picture of the "oldest smelted copper", I can give you a vague idea of what "finding" up to 9000 year old things actually entails: long and hard physical work after a long and dedicated study of the scientific background.



More:
https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/kap_a/advanced/ta_1_2j.html