TY - JOUR
T1 - The Earliest Lead Object in the Levant
AU - Yahalom-Mack, Naama
AU - Langgut, Dafna
AU - Dvir, Omri
AU - Tirosh, Ofir
AU - Eliyahu-Behar, Adi
AU - Erel, Yigal
AU - Langford, Boaz
AU - Frumkin, Amos
AU - Ullman, Mika
AU - Davidovich, Uri
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Yahalom-Macket al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2015/12/1
Y1 - 2015/12/1
N2 - In the deepest section of a large complex cave in the northern Negev desert, Israel, a biconical lead object was found logged onto a wooden shaft. Associated material remains and radiocarbon dating of the shaft place the object within the Late Chalcolithic period, at the late 5th millennium BCE. Based on chemical and lead isotope analysis, we show that this unique object was made of almost pure metallic lead, likely smelted from lead ores originating in the Taurus range in Anatolia. Either the finished object, or the raw material, was brought to the southern Levant, adding another major component to the already-rich Late Chalcolithic metallurgical corpus known to-date. The paper also discusses possible uses of the object, suggesting that it may have been used as a spindle whorl, at least towards its deposition.
AB - In the deepest section of a large complex cave in the northern Negev desert, Israel, a biconical lead object was found logged onto a wooden shaft. Associated material remains and radiocarbon dating of the shaft place the object within the Late Chalcolithic period, at the late 5th millennium BCE. Based on chemical and lead isotope analysis, we show that this unique object was made of almost pure metallic lead, likely smelted from lead ores originating in the Taurus range in Anatolia. Either the finished object, or the raw material, was brought to the southern Levant, adding another major component to the already-rich Late Chalcolithic metallurgical corpus known to-date. The paper also discusses possible uses of the object, suggesting that it may have been used as a spindle whorl, at least towards its deposition.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84955594811&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0142948
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0142948
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C2 - 26630666
AN - SCOPUS:84955594811
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 10
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 12
M1 - e0142948
ER -