Copper axe

The copper axes from South-East Europe mark the beginning of the use of metals in our continent. Most originate from the Carpathian Basin, Serbia, Bulgaria and Moldavia. A few examples are also known from other places in the Balkan peninsular, Ukraine, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland. They were already in use in the first third of the 5th millennium B.C.E. and achieved their greatest distribution around 4,000 B.C.E., long before the start of the Bronze Age. As copper was an extremely valuable raw material at that time, these two axes are probably prestige objects.