Copper Age Axe

Origins

For hundreds of thousands of years the axe was stone: first the Flint Hand Axe held in the fist, then polished stone heads bound to wooden handles by the first farmers. Copper changed that. Across Europe and the Near East in the fifth and fourth millennia BC, people learned to smelt copper from its ores and cast it in molds, and the axe was one of the first things they made. A copper blade could be resharpened by hammering rather than regrinding, and it did not shatter. But copper ore was found in few places, and smelting was a specialist's skill, so a copper axe was rare, valuable and a sign of rank. In northern Italy, burials of the Remedello culture show men laid to rest with copper axes and daggers as badges of status.

Design & Construction

The best-preserved copper axe in the world was found on 19 September 1991, when hikers came upon a body melting out of a glacier at the Tisenjoch pass in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy. The man, now called Ötzi, had died around 3200 BC, and his equipment had survived with him. His axe has a trapezoidal flat blade about 9.5 cm long, cast from copper that is nearly 99.7 percent pure and then hammered to harden the edge. It sits in the fork of an L-shaped haft about 60 cm long, carved from a single piece of yew where a branch met the trunk, and it is glued in place with birch tar and lashed with thin leather strips. Analysis of the metal published in 2017 showed that the copper came from southern Tuscany, hundreds of kilometers away, though Ötzi himself lived in the valleys south of the Alps — evidence of long-distance trade in metal. Experiments with replicas show that such an axe could fell a yew tree in under an hour.

Combat Use

A copper axe was a tool first, but in a world without swords it was also one of the most effective weapons a man could carry. Ötzi himself died violently: an arrowhead of flint was lodged in his left shoulder, and he had fresh wounds on his hand, probably from close fighting in the days before he died. There is no sign he used the axe in that fight, but its presence, alongside a flint dagger and a bow, shows the weapons of a man ready to defend himself. Rock art in the Alps, such as the carved stelae of Valcamonica and the Val d'Aosta, shows men with axes and daggers like his as symbols of power, and later Copper Age and early Bronze Age burials in central Europe include skulls with wounds made by axes.

Legacy

Copper was soon alloyed with tin to make bronze, which was harder and cast better, and the bronze axe and then the bronze sword replaced the copper axe during the third and second millennia BC. But the copper axe marks the start of the age of metal weapons, and Ötzi's axe, now in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, is one of the most studied objects in European prehistory. It reshaped what archaeologists thought about the Copper Age in the Alps, and it is the starting point of a lineage of war axes that runs through the Viking Battle Axe and the Dane Axe to the Frankish Francisca.