Scientists find copper factory from 2700 B.C.

Working in the arid desert of southern Jordan, University of California, San Diego archeologists have uncovered a massive 5,000-year-old copper factory -- a Silicon Valley of the Early Bronze Age that helped power mankind's leap from the Stone Age to more complex, urbanized societies.

The 70-room complex, on a well-defended mesa about 30 miles south of the Dead Sea, was dedicated to producing copper ingots, axes, hammers and other artifacts that are believed to have spread throughout the Middle and Near East.

Called Khirbat Hamra Ifdan, or KHI for short, the factory apparently was destroyed by an earthquake about 2700 B.C., a disaster for the owners and workers but a spectacular opportunity for the UC San Diego team.

The preservation of artifacts is similar to that at the Roman village of Pompeii, which was destroyed by a volcano in 79, said UC San Diego anthropologist Thomas Levy, who led the expedition with archeologist Russell Adams.

"We really hit the jackpot here," he said. "We were extremely lucky to find it as well preserved as it is and not robbed."

The team has excavated thousands of artifacts from the site, including crucibles, ingots, copper lumps and slag, copper tools and more than 1,000 ceramic molds for casting ingots and tools. By comparison, the largest copper production facility previously unearthed, at Hisarlik, Turkey -- site of the legendary Troy -- yielded fewer than 70.

The scope of the installation has astounded other scientists.

"This tells us that the folks who were living there were technologically more sophisticated than we had anticipated and engaging in metallurgy on a scale we hadn't appreciated," said archeologist Steven Falconer of Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research.

A window on society

The factory "is related to the time when the first cities emerged, the first walled towns, all over the ancient Near East," Levy said. "Early metallurgy opens a kind of window on how societies evolved."

Archeologists previously had noted what they called a "virtual explosion" in the availability and use of copper objects from the Early Bronze Age and onward, a phenomenon often referred to as Metallschock, added Adams.

Such items previously had been associated only with the culturally elite, as markers of social ranking and personal prestige. Suddenly, however, copper objects became objects of mass consumption, available to nearly everyone.

The site was found by a British road engineer in the early 1970s, but no excavations were carried out and "nobody had any inkling that it was very important," Adams said.

At the 13 smelting facilities at the site, the team discovered about 5,000 tons of slag, indicating that the complex produced several hundred tons of copper over its lifetime.