Archaeologists Found a Pile of Bronze Body Parts in an Ancient Statue Scrapyard
Archaeologists in Turkey discovered roughly 2,000 pieces of bronze statues broken apart in what was likely an ancient scrapyard.
The bronze statues were split into sections, including feet, hands, and even eyeballs.
Dumped into a corner, experts believe the bronze may have been waiting to be reused and minted into coins.
The three Rs—reuse, reduce, recycle—seem to have been a crucial part of the Late Antiquity period sculpture ecosystem. Among the ruins of the city of Metropolis, which is now Izmir, Turkey, archaeologists discovered hundreds of bits and pieces of bronze statues piled up in the corner of a section of the city’s layout that the archaeologists think must have been a scrapyard or even an early version of a recycling center for other sculptors.
The Heritage to the Future Project, led by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism with the help of Serdar Aybek, professor of archaeology at Dokuz Eylül University, discovered roughly 2,000 broken pieces of bronze statues in a heap—among the jagged bits were eyes, fingers, sandals, chunks of head and more.
With pieces ranging in style from Hellenistic to Roman, Aybek called the revelation “extraordinary discoveries, even for our field of work,” according to Arkeo News. “We have uncovered approximately 2,000 bronze statue fragments.”
The archaeologists posited a theory that the site containing the shattered bronze is considered an ancient scrap yard, of sorts, likely a spot where workers dismantled bronze statues so that broken pieces could be recycled by being melted down for future use.
Aybek said that in the Late Antiquity period, as mythological beliefs were abandoned for monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, many of the bronze idols from the earlier days lost their spiritual value. “Although we do not yet have archaeological evidence to confirm this claim, we can suggest that a significant portion of them were repurposed for minting coins,” he said about the operation. “During that period, rather than producing new materials, bronze groups, mainly consisting of outdated or damaged statues, were broken apart by the ancient scrap yard worker and prepared for melting.”
Mixed in with the actual fragments of statues, including one statue still with an inscription honoring “Metropolitan Apollonios,” were bronze plates commonly found when casting or fixing bronze statues. Aybek believes the plates are evidence of the city’s status as a key location for the bronze statue trade. Consider Metropolis a sort of one-stop-shop for all things bronze statues, from the original creation to a place to discard them to a marketplace for materials to build them.
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