Many copper smelting sites in the southern Levant, one of the core areas for studying the development of copper metallurgy, provide scarce evidence regarding their date. It is common that such sites consist only of a scatter of slag fragments on top of a hill, sometimes with remains of the smelting installation, and often without any indicative ceramic remains or datable charcoal samples. This situation caused a lot of dispute among scholars who were interested in reconstructing the development of metal industry in the region.

Although some efforts were done to develop dating methods that concern the slag samples themselves (e.g. TL or slag-typology), the results were poor, and sometimes misleading (especially in the case of ‘slag typology’). In our talk, we suggest using the slag magnetic properties as a tool for independent dating.

Slag is one of the best recorders of the ancient geomagnetic field. Ferromagnetic minerals found in any slag type acquire the magnetic properties of the field in which they were cooled down. As most slag deposits are not found in their original cooling position, it is mostly the intensity component (the strength of the field) that can be extracted through a series of complex experiments (this measurement is called ‘archaeointensity’). The existing curve of archaeointensity changes for the southern Levant is based on samples from well dated contexts and is a useful reference for a rough dating of any slag sample from which high quality archaeointensity result were extracted. The quality of the dating depends on the period and the resolution of the existing curve.

As will be demonstrated in our talk, dating of Chalcolithic, Early Bronze and Late Bronze Age smelting sites were possible using this method, and the results add a significant insights to our understanding of the metallurgical development in the region.