metallurgy

A simple silver bracelet buried with a young woman over 4,000 years ago has just rewritten what archaeologists thought they knew about Bronze Age metalworking in Western Europe. The discovery proves that sophisticated craftsmen in southeastern Spain were using advanced casting techniques centuries before anyone else on the continent, challenging long-held assumptions about how metallurgical knowledge spread across ancient Europe. The groundbreaking finding, published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, reveals that metalworkers from the El Argar culture were employing lost-wax casting, a complex technique requiring considerable skill, as early as 2200 BC. This makes it the earliest confirmed evidence of this sophisticated process anywhere in Western Europe during the Bronze Age. Spanish Skeletons Reveal Deep-Rooted Inequality of El Argar