Un atelier specializat în prelucrarea aurului din Epoca cuprului
A gold processing workshop from Copper Age

Summary/Abstract: The first gold ornaments, originated in Europe and Anatolia in the middle of the 5th millennium BC, are being considered especially part of the inventory of some graves. The workshop for processing gold objects from „Peștera Ungurească”, Cheile Turzii, is the first of its kind in the Euro-Asian area at this chronological level, namely the Copper Age. It had several stages of recovery and we appreciated that its period of operation was of about 300-350 years, in the range 4150-3800 cal BC. The oldest levels (about 7) were not researched. It starts to work at Sălcuța IIc-IV- Toarte pastilate/Băile Herculane II-III – Cheile Turzii level. The workshop was intermittently used. Gold came from the Arieș River. Inside the workshop there were discovered an oven, crucibles, slag, as well as various tools used in the processing of golden objects. The typology of the ornaments is quite varied, including beads, gold plaques, or pieces applied to clothing or armor. Microscopic photos of the pieces allowed the recognition of several operations used for their processing (cold welding, hot welding, cutting, au repoussé technique). The pieces discovered by us are mostly scrap, others are in different stages of processing; we suppose others were lost in the workshop space. The ornaments produced here were exchanged with other communities, being at the same time a feature of ranked societies. The workshop of golden ornaments at the „Peștera Ungurească” is thus unique, the importance of the discovery being doubled by the possibility of establishing the techniques and methods used by the metallurgical craftsmen of the epoch, which probably constituted a special category within the respective communities and kept the „secrets” of the gold processing.

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