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Map of prehistoric sites in Cornwall associated with copper, tin, and gold extraction and smelting (ST/BC after Penhallurick 1986).
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Over the last 25 years new evidence has emerged of the scale of prospection for copper and its mining during the Early-Middle Bronze Age in Britain. We know of 12 mines worked in the period 2100 − 1600BC, whilst the largest mine on the Great Orme continued until the Late Bronze Age, with perhaps its maximum output which may have been equivalent to...
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Context 1
... archeological contexts, and partly an issue of insufficient archeological work (and the difficulties of doing such work) within the river valley-linked tin grounds. The latter includes the Carnon and Pentewan valleys in West Cornwall where the gravels have been worked and re-worked for tin, more or less continually, for more than a thousand years (Fig. 5). PowerPoint slideOriginal jpg (46.00KB)Display full size Currently, the best evidence for this are the collected small caches of alluvial tin found at number of the Bronze Age settlements. One such find was of cassiterite pebbles within the settlement at Trevisker. These pebbles were typical of the cassiterite of Goss Moor from which ...
Context 2
... on the West of England mining region. Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall 1912, 14.]. Most of this was in the form of tiny flakes, but the largest gold nugget found in the Carnon Valley in 1808 weighed 59.6 g. Other gold-producing sites in West Cornwall included Ladock, Boscarne (Bodmin), and St Stephen-in-Brannel (SEE Fig. 5), but gold also occurred in the Dartmoor tin streams where the tinners likewise carried birds' quills and "not uncommonly Two Early Bronze Age gold lunulae found at Harlyn Bay near Padstow (Fig. 10) revealed concentrations of 50 ppm and 950 ppm tin, and a third from St. Juliot 650 ppm tin. In comparison to this, native Cornish gold has ...
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This paper presents the archaeological material excavated in 1920 by D. Karapandžić from the site of Zók which is being kept in the National Museum in Belgrade.
Now, almost hundred years after the excavations, the material is being analysed and some of it is presented for the first time. The site dates to the Copper Age Lasinja- Balaton Culture. T...
Citations
... Mining in the area dates back to the Bronze Age (ca. 2500-800 BCE), and later, during the Industrial Revolution , the region dominated the global output of tin, copper and arsenic (Burt et al., 2014;Timberlake, 2017). Accordingly, the area has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape; https://www.cornishmining.org.uk/). ...
... In this sense, it should be remembered that for many centuries bronze was obtained by direct reduction in the smelting furnace, jointly processing copper minerals (malachite or azurite), tin (cassiterite), and occasionally the intentional alloying with lead to improve the casting ability of the metal [31,32]. The ideal working conditions would require reaching high temperatures (1000-1100 °C), highly reducing environments, and a high fuel consumption per load for the complete reduction of the ore to metallic tin. ...
This paper shows the results of the archeometallurgical study of 31 iron pieces, 23 bronze pieces, 1 silver, and 1 gold piece found in the archeological site of La Ulaña, which is located in the north of Spain in the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains, and that lived its period of greatest splendor coinciding with the Second Iron Age. The basic chemical and microstructural analyses of the iron- and copper-based objects provide an overview of the use of these metals in the site. The results obtained are compared with those published from other archeological sites nearby. In addition, the most unique pieces are set in their archeological context to facilitate the understanding of their chronological ascription.
... De plus, bien qu'appuyées par des données de terrain, les estimations précédentes peuvent varier fortement pour une même mine selon les auteurs 10 , car les éléments pris en compte pour réaliser les calculs (volume du vide réel ou extrapolé, choix de la teneur moyenne) modifient grandement les estimations proposées, et ne sont pas toujours précisés dans les publications. Le même constat peut être appliqué aux estimations portant sur de grandes régions : Jackson propose une production de 1463 t de cuivre pour l'ensemble de l'Irlande 9 Pour le cuivre : dans le Tyrol autrichien (Pernicka et al. 2016) et dans les îles britanniques (Timberlake 2017 ;Jackson 1984) ou encore pour l'or à l'âge du Fer dans le Limousin (Cauuet et al. 2018). ...
... 10 La mine de Great Orme (pays de Galles) a fait l'objet de trois calculs de production (non détaillés dans les publications) présentant des résultats discordants allant de 35 t (Timberlake 2017), 30-175 t (Lewis 1996) à 1769 t (Randall 1995) produites. La production de la mine de Mount Gabriel (Irlande) a été estimée à 163 t (Jackson 1984) Or, ces travaux menés à une échelle régionale présentent un intérêt majeur : ils permettent de discuter de l'importance des métaux dans l'économie de secteurs donnés, mais aussi de comparer les capacités de production de différentes régions. ...
... uit Zuidoost-Frankrijk, kubusvormige kralen uit een uit de vroege bronstijd daterend kindergraf uit Tabel 1. Afmetingen en gewichten van de kralen uit Borger. (Mühldorfer & Schweizer 1999;Briard 2001: 41-45;Montero et al. 2003;Timberlake 2017). De bekendste uit deze groep zijn de Armoricaanse kokerbijlen, die soms uit puur lood zijn vervaardigd. ...
Copper, lead and tin – an extraordinary Late Bronze Age string of beads from Borger. Around 2017, an amateur metal detectorist searching at Borger in the immediate vicinity of the base of a Middle Bronze Age barrow, which had been excavated in 1987, came across 245 metal beads: four large beads and 241 small ones. One of the four large beads is made of lead, two are of a lead/tin alloy and one is of copper; the 241 biconical and cylindrical small beads are all made of copper. XRF analysis showed that the copper is of a type known as Fahlerz or Fahlore (which includes Singen and Ösenring types of copper). Fahlerz was used mostly in the Early Bronze Age, but also into the Late Bronze Age. The known intensification in the use of lead in Western Europe between 1000 and 500 BC makes it likely that the string of beads was buried – possibly as an isolated deposit – in the Late Bronze Age, no later than the 8th century BC. Further research is planned in the near future, viz. lead-isotope analysis and a small-scale field investigation.
... Early copper alloys within Britain and Ireland were largely derived from arsenical copper ore mined from Ross Island in southwestern Ireland (O'Brien, 2004), which was the source of most of the copper in Britain from c. 2400 cal BC (Bray, 2012). Although copper mines dating to the Early Bronze Age (EBA hereafter) have been discovered in recent decades, such as Copa Hill, Cwmystwyth, in Wales, Ecton Hill and Alderley Edge in the English Peak District (Timberlake, 2003(Timberlake, , 2014(Timberlake, , 2017Timberlake & Pragg, 2005), and the largely Middle Bronze Age mine at Great Orme in Wales (Williams & Le Carlier de Veslud, 2019), Ross Island is currently the earliest mining site known in Britain and Ireland (Carey et al., 2019), although some of the earliest deposits at Copa Hill could date to a similar period (Timberlake & Craddock, 2013). ...
... This sparse evidence for the exploitation of metalliferous resources in south-western Britain and indeed western Europe (Gandois et al., 2020) during the EBA presents a paradox, as the Cornish peninsula is rich in copper, gold, and especially tin (Penhallurick, 1986;Timberlake, 2017;Radivojevićet al., 2018). Recent advances in analytical techniques, including isotopic analysis of artefacts and identification of potential ore sources, have revealed that traces of these metals from south-western England were probably present in Bronze Age artefacts (Rohl & Needham, 1998;Haustein et al., 2010;Bray & Pollard, 2012). ...
... Research on copper sources, both in terms of their excavation (e.g. Dutton & Fasham, 1994;O'Brien, 1994O'Brien, , 2004O'Brien, , 2013O'Brien, , 2015Timberlake, 2003Timberlake, , 2014Timberlake, , 2017Timberlake et al., 2004;Timberlake & Pragg, 2005) and the understanding of their chemical signatures (Ixer & Budd, 1998;Rohl & Needham, 1998;Bray & Pollard, 2012), has been very successful over the last three decades. Yet the discovery of tin mining and processing remains elusive. ...
The appearance of Beaker pottery in Britain and Ireland during the twenty-fifth century bc marks a significant archaeological horizon, being synchronous with the first metal artefacts. The adoption of arsenical copper, mostly from Ireland, was followed by that of tin-bronze around 2200 bc . However, whilst the copper mine of Ross Island in Ireland is securely dated to the Early Bronze Age, and further such mines in the UK have been dated to the Early and Middle Bronze Age, the evidence for the exploitation of tin ores, the other key ingredient to make bronze, has remained circumstantial. This article contains the detailed analyses of seven stone artefacts from securely dated contexts, using a combination of surface pXRF and microwear analysis. The results provide strong evidence that the tools were used in cassiterite processing. The combined analysis of these artefacts documents in detail the exploitation of Cornish tin during this early phase of metal use in Britain and Ireland.
... Opencast mining was a common technique for exploiting mineral resources during the Bronze Age (e.g., the copper mines of Great Orme in Wales;O'Brien, 2015;Timberlake, 2017). Paradoxically, in the Alps, prehistoric underground mines have been much better investigated, because most prehistoric mines were discovered in the 19th century during modern underground mining activities. ...
Prehistoric mines are often too large and too deep for conventional archaeological excavations. Non‐destructive and minimally invasive methods of prospection can help to overcome these limits. Our case study of a Late Bronze Age opencast mine (ca. 1050 to 780 BC) shows the potential of geophysical prospection methods combined with core drillings. For the reconstruction of this mine, we combined electrical resistivity and induced polarization (IP) tomography, seismic refraction tomography (SRT) and ground penetrating radar (GPR). The geophysical data were collected based on an orthogonal grid of 10 longitudinal and transverse profiles, laid out over an area of ~330 × 300 m. The profiles allowed a three‐dimensional interpolation of the geological units, the mining dumps, the mining areas and the residual mineralization. Additionally, two deep cores were drilled to ground‐truth the geophysical prospection results. They provided information about the stratification at intersections of the measurement grid, and this proved crucial for validating the interpreted geophysical profiles. Each geophysical method applied provided different information for the reconstruction of the site: the electrical resistivity tomography offered the best clues as to the locations of the geological units and the dumps, the seismic refraction tomography visualized the transition between the dump or backfill layers and the underlying bedrock, and the IP measurements revealed residual mineralization. The georadar measurements, on the other hand, did not contribute to the interpretation owing to the limited depth of penetration. Based on the combination of borehole and geophysical data, it was possible to develop a hypothetical model of an open‐pit mine for copper ore that developed in three phases (mines A–C) during the Late Bronze Age. Without the control provided by the core drillings, one of the mining areas (mine A) could not have been correctly identified in the geophysical prospections.
... Carey et al., 2019).Timberlake (2017) furthermore mentions a couple of picks coming from alleged Bronze Age (open-cast) minings. One of these picks found in the Lower Carnon Valley, Cornwall, has been recently radiocarbon-dated to ca. 1600 BCE providing the first direct record for Bronze Age tin mining in Britain(Timberlake and Hartgroves, 2018).Comparable vestiges are not ...
Since the mid-1970s a Bronze Age assemblage of metal objects has been recovered from the seabed off the south Devon coast at Salcombe, southwest England. The assemblage spans two suspected shipwreck events and comprises nearly 400 pieces of raw materials and finished artefacts, primarily in copper, tin, bronze and gold. Among these are 280 copper and 40 tin ingots, by far the largest discovery of Bronze Age ingots in either metal from northwestern Europe. Research in recent years revealed the microstructural and chemical nature of the ingots and enabled some preliminary conclusions on the metals trade in Europe in the Later Bronze Age. The present study aims to extend this knowledge by determining the tin, copper and lead isotopic compositions of the ingots using HR-MC-ICP-MS. In addition, bronze artefacts (swords, rapiers, palstaves and weights) from the Salcombe site are included in the multi-proxy approach in order to investigate their history and the possible relationships between finished products and ingots. In combination with the available chemical data of previous studies, the current results of the tin metal show that most likely two tin sources in southwest Britain supplied the ore for their production. This also sheds light on Late Bronze Age tin ingots from Israel that share the same geochemical characteristics with one group of the finds from Salcombe. Although the tin in the bronzes is similar to the tin in the ingots, it is not certain that the latter were used to make the bronzes. Correlations of copper and tin isotopes and trace elements of the bronzes point to a mixing or even recycling of copper-tin alloys rather than the alloying of individual components of copper and tin. However, the copper ingots from the assemblage could have been an additional component in the mixing process given their impurity pattern and isotopic composition. At the same time, a close relationship between swords of the Rosnoën type and palstaves from the cargo is disclosed. Lead isotope ratios for their part suggest Sardinian and/or south Spanish copper ores as a source for both the copper ingots and the copper of the bronzes. This would mean long-distance metal trade in the Later Bronze Age in both cases and would provide new insights into the interpretation of the prehistoric networks in Europe.
... They suggest a cosmological reason why this might have happened with a material from a distant source increasing the supernatural power of a ritual object. Timberlake (2016) has broadly agreed with Standish et al. (2015), additionally suggesting that in the later part of the Early Bronze Age gold production does actually commence in Ireland. ...
... We know that the Ross Island mine was in decline from about 2000 BC . There then appears to be an attempt to replace the lost copper both in Ireland, with other copper mines in the southwest, and also by new mines in Britain beginning around 1800BC (Timberlake 2016). This is potentially a lengthy time period between Ross Islands 'peak copper' and the time it took for sufficient new sources of copper to be prospected and brought into production, or imported from the continent, even in Britain. ...
Burials and Society in Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Ireland describes and analyses the increasing complexity of later Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burial in Ireland, using burial complexity as a proxy for increasing social complexity, and as a tool for examining social structure. The book commences with a discussion of theoretical approaches to the study of burials in both anthropology and archaeology and continues with a summary of the archaeological and environmental background to the Irish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Then a set of criteria for identifying different types of social organisation is proposed, before an in-depth examination of the radiocarbon chronology of Irish Single Burials, which leads to a multifaceted statistical analysis of the Single Burial Tradition burial utilising descriptive and multivariate statistical approaches. A chronological model of the Irish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age is then presented which provides the basis for a discussion of increasing burial and social complexity in Ireland over this period, proposing an evolution from an egalitarian society in the later Chalcolithic Period through to a prestige goods chiefdom emerging around 1900 BC. It is suggested that the decline of copper production at Ross Island, Co. Cork after 2000 BC may have led to a ‘copper crisis’ which would have been a profoundly disrupting event, destroying the influence of copper miners and shifting power to copper workers, and those who controlled them. This would have provided a stimulus towards the centralisation of power and the emergence of a ranked social hierarchy. The effects of this ‘copper crisis’ would have been felt in Britain also, where much Ross Island copper was consumed and may have led to similar developments, with the emergence of the Wessex Culture a similar response in Britain to the same stimulus.
... are strong indicators for the local processing of tin ores during the Bronze Age. Further support for early tin placer mining and processing in Cornwall is expected by a reinvestigation and 14C-dating of antler picks that have been discovered during the 19th century in the Carnon Valley near Truro and are very likely related to mining activities(Timberlake 2017). On the Iberian Peninsula the site Cerro de San Cristóbal at Logrosán(Fig. ...
Tin is an essential raw material both for the copper–tin alloys developed during the Early Bronze Age and for the casting of tableware in the Medieval period. Secondary geological deposits in the form of placers (cassiterite) provide easily accessible sources but have often been reworked several times during land‐use history. In fact, evidence for the earliest phase of tin mining during the Bronze Age has not yet been confirmed for any area in Europe, stimulating an ongoing debate on this issue. For this study, a broad range of methods (sedimentology, pedology, palynology, anthracology, OSL/14C‐dating, and micromorphology) was applied both within the extraction zone of placer mining and the downstream alluvial sediments at Schellerhau site in the upper eastern Erzgebirge (Germany). The results indicate that the earliest local removal of topsoil and processing of cassiterite‐bearing weathered granite occurred already in the early second millennium BC, thus coinciding with the early and middle Bronze Age period. Placer mining resumed in this area during the Medieval period, probably as early as the 13th century AD. A peak of alluvial sedimentation during the mid‐15th century AD is probably related to the acquisition of this region by the Elector of Saxony and the subsequent promotion of mining.
... As for lead isotopes, Alderley Edge is clearly a possibility, as shown above, with at least two matches in addition to the British axe from Pile. The first use of the Great Orme mines is in fact contemporaneous with activities at the Alderley Edge mines [83,107,[109][110][111]. Currently, however, there are no trace element data available for Alderley Edge nor from the contemporary mining sites in central and northern Wales, to strengthen these possibilities. ...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0219574.].
