Copper Age treasures

Copper Age treasures

Now a chronicle of that expedition will be on display at the San Diego Museum of Man starting Sunday.

Called to the Copper Age, the exhibit is intended to complement the Dead Sea Scrolls presentation at the San Diego Natural History Museum this summer.

Levy expedition took place in the Dead Sea region, though the period he studies called the Copper Age or the Chalcolithic Age was roughly 4,000 years before the scrolls were written.

of them deal with the archaeology of the Holy Land, but this gives a more deeptime view, Levy said.

The 53yearold archaeologist is pleased to have his work displayed in his home town. museum has put on an exhibit of his findings.

means a great deal to me to be able to share this research project. The Chalcolithic was my first love, after my wife, said Levy, who teaches classes on anthropology, archaeology and the Bible at the University of California San Diego. He also has hosted This, a UCSD television program he established to highlight the work of archaeologists.

material is so spectacular, beautiful from a purely artistic point of view that it a joy to share it, he said.

National Geographic Kenneth Garrett photographed the expedition and his photographs are also on display at the Balboa Park museum.

The 1997 expedition included 10 donkeys, 10 Bedouin handlers and an international team of archaeologists from Jordan, Israel China Rubber Mold and Germany.

Sleeping in tents but eating catered food, the travelers mined bluetinted ore in Jordan by hand, then trekked it to the site of a prehistoric smelting village near modernday Beersheba, Israel.

The methods they recreated would have been pioneered 6,000 years ago duringthe Copper Age so called because China Rubber Mold people moved from using stone tools to forging metal ones.

One thing Levy learned from the Rubber moulding company handson approach is how tough metalworking is using the earliest ways.

As a result, he now says metal objects might have been more of a status symbol in that culture than he realized.

The exhibit also uses Copper Age items on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, such as metal weapon heads, scepters, crowns and figurines.

Some came from Levy digs over his career. Others came from the of the Treasure, a huge cache of copper objects found in the 1960s when researchers were looking for more Dead Sea Scrolls.

Many of these items have never before left Israel and are available only now because the Israel Museum is undergoing renovations.

Mari Lyn Salvador, Museum of Man director, said she wants to mount more exhibits drawing from the work of San Diegans.

and exhibitions are a wonderful way for scholars and faculty at our universities to make the results of China Mould their research accessible to the public, Salvador said.

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