Excavations in southern Jordan have uncovered the largest Early Bronze Age metal works in the Middle East. The factory-like operation, which ran from around 4,700 to 4,200 years ago, represented a “quantum leap” in the scale of copper production at a time when ancient cities in the area experienced rapid growth, archaeologist Thomas E. Levy of the University of California, San Diego and his coworkers report in the June Antiquity.
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