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The Chalcolithic (;〔The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) ISBN 0-19-861263-X, p. 301: "Chalcolithic /,kælkəl'lɪθɪk/ adjective ''Archaeology'' of, relating to, or denoting a period in the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE, chiefly in the Near East and SE Europe, during which some weapons and tools were made of copper. This period was still largely Neolithic in character. Also called Eneolithic... Also called Copper Age - ''Origin'' early 20th cent.: from Greek ''khalkos'' 'copper' + ''lithos'' 'stone' + -ic".〕 ''khalkós'', "copper" and ''líthos'', "stone")〔 period or Copper Age,〔 also known as the Eneolithic〔 or Æneolithic (from Latin ''aeneus'' "of bronze"), is a phase of the Bronze Age before it was discovered that adding tin to copper formed the harder bronze. The Copper Age was originally defined as a transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. However, because it is characterized by the use of metals, the Copper Age is considered a part of the Bronze Age rather than the Stone Age. The archaeological site of Belovode on the Rudnik mountain in Serbia contains the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper making at high temperature, from 5,000 BCE.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Serbian site may have hosted first copper makers )〕 ==Origin of name== The multiple names result from multiple recognitions of the period. Originally the term "Bronze Age" meant that either copper or bronze was being used as the chief hard substance for the manufacture of tools and weapons. In 1881, John Evans, recognizing that the use of copper often preceded the use of bronze, distinguished between a transitional Copper Age and the Bronze Age proper. He did not include this transitional period in the tripartite system of Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age but placed it at the beginning outside of it. He did not, however, present it as a fourth age, but chose to retain the traditional three-age system. In 1884, Gaetano Chierici, perhaps following the lead of Evans, renamed it in Italian as the ''Eneo-litica'', or "Bronze-stone" transition. This phrase was never intended to mean that the period was the only one in which both bronze and stone were used. The Copper Age features the use of copper, excluding bronze; moreover, stone continued to be used throughout both the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. "Litica" simply names the Stone Age as the point from which the transition began and is not another -lithic age. The Eneolithic was never part of the Stone Age, which ended conclusively the moment the first smelter succeeded in obtaining copper from copper ore for the first time. Subsequently British scholars used either Evans's "Copper Age" or the term "Eneolithic" (or Aeneolithic), a translation of Chierici's ''eneo-litica''. After several years, a number of complaints appeared in the literature that "Eneolithic" seemed to the untrained eye to be produced from e-neolithic, "outside the Neolithic," clearly not a definitive characterization of the Copper Age. About the year 1900, many writers began to substitute "Chalcolithic" for Eneolithic, to avoid the false segmentation. It was at this time that the misunderstanding began among those who had not understood the Italian. The -lithic was seen as a new -lithic age, a part of the Stone Age in which copper was used, which may appear paradoxical. Today Copper Age, Eneolithic and Chalcolithic are used synonymously to mean Evans's original definition of Copper Age. The period is a transitional one, but does not stand outside the traditional three-age system. The analysing stone tool assemblages from sites on the Tehran Plain in Iran has illustrated the effects of the introduction of copper working technologies on the in place systems of lithic craft specialists and raw materials. Networks of exchange and specialized processing and production that had evolved during the Neolithic seem to have collapsed by the Middle Chalcolithic (''c'' 4500-3500 BCE) and been replaced by the use of local materials by a primarily household base production of stone tools. It appears that copper was not widely exploited at first, and that efforts in alloying it with tin and other metals began quite soon, making it difficult to distinguish the distinct Chalcolithic cultures from later periods. The boundary between the Copper and Bronze Ages is indistinct, since alloys faded in and out of use due to the erratic supply of tin. The emergence of metallurgy may have occurred first in the Fertile Crescent, where it gave rise to the Bronze Age in the 4th millennium BCE (the traditional view), though finds from the Vinča culture in Europe have now been securely dated to slightly earlier than those of the Fertile Crescent. There was an independent invention of copper and bronze smelting first by Andean civilizations in South America extended later by sea commerce to the Mesoamerican civilization in West Mexico (see Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America and Metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica). The literature of European archaeology, in general, avoids the use of 'chalcolithic' (the term 'Copper Age' is preferred), whereas Middle Eastern archaeologists regularly use it. The Copper Age in the Middle East and the Caucasus began in the late 5th millennium BCE and lasted for about a millennium before it gave rise to the Early Bronze Age. The transition from the European Copper Age to Bronze Age Europe occurs about the same time, between the late 5th and the late 3rd millennia BCE. According to Parpola,〔A.Parpola, 2005〕 ceramic similarities between the Indus Civilization, southern Turkmenistan, and northern Iran during 4300–3300 BCE of the Chalcolithic period (Copper Age) suggest considerable mobility and trade. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chalcolithic」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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