10 Things to Love About Copper Jewelry and Ancient Goddesses

Early Human Jewelry and Adornment

10 Things to Love About Copper Jewelry and Ancient Goddesses AOC Jewelry News

The human desire for self-adornment is universal, and writing about copper jewelry trends should be a snap for most people. Not for Anne. I can make writing needlessly complicated, but in this case, the writing took me back to the continuously-revealing story of women’s history.

Only Anne of Carversville whips up a narrative around copper jewelry that takes us back to the dawn of human existence, and then out of Africa between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago into the Levant, a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia.

Today, the Levant includes regions of Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

My writing started down a simple path with a simple topic. Three days later, I had fallen down a rabbit hole of epic depth.

What I will do next is to revisit each of the 10 points and investigate them individually. I must tell you that when I understood copper as our first metal and that prehistoric women made jewelry [which I knew], the transition to using copper as our earliest tools had me bat crazy.

I know the research about women — not men — being the majority of our earliest cave painters, at least in Europe. France acknowledges it as factual history now in its own cave paintings, and the articles are here on AOC.

As I began searching for women as inventors of the first tools — once I learned they were of copper — I knew what the answer would be. Still, to read the consensus that women were very active in early toolmaking of copper instead of stone — considered one of the greatest advancements of humankind — was an incredible and emotional discovery.

This article is the foundation for a 2023 deep dive back into the history of women from the reality of a more egalitarian participation in early human society to lives more contained and controlled by men.

The framework is here, and my mind is on fire.

Humans Have Loved Copper Jewelry for 10-11,000 Years

Background: in understanding the importance of human history and invention, jewelry was not very high on the list of primarily male researchers and scientists.

Frankly, jewelry as artifacts was considered inconsequential and frivolous in the story of human development. Copper jewelry was so frivolous that the existence of The Copper Age, dating from the mid-5th millennium BC, and ending with the beginning of the Bronze Age proper, in the late 4th to 3rd millennium BC, was barely worth mentioning in the scientific community.

You’ve heard of The Stone Age and the Bronze Age. But few of us — including me — knew about The Copper Age. The REAL history of copper jewelry starts to upset several thousands of years of assumptions around women’s lives.

These are my stream-of-consciousness but constantly verified thoughts about copper jewelry — which is way more important to me today than it was just one week ago. ~ Anne