Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain: The Great Orme Copper Mine and European Trade Williams R. Alan
Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain: The Great Orme Copper Mine and European Trade Williams R. Alan The Great Orme copper mine on the coast of north Wales is one of the largest surviving Bronze Age…
Specifikacia Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain: The Great Orme Copper Mine and European Trade Williams R. Alan
Boom and Bust in Bronze Age Britain: The Great Orme Copper Mine and European Trade Williams R. Alan
The Great Orme copper mine on the coast of north Wales is one of the largest surviving Bronze Age mines in Europe. Until now this remained something of a mystery. But where did all the copper go?
These claims had marginalised the mine as an unimportant copper source, whose extensive workings were explained away as being merely the result of small-scale workings over nearly a thousand years. It was claimed in the 1990s that the mine only produced a low impurity type of copper that was uncommon in the British Bronze Age. However, the results of this new interdisciplinary research, which combines archaeological and geological knowledge with the latest scientific analytical methods, radically changes that picture.
This new evidence reveals a copper mine of European importance, which dominated Britain's copper supply for two centuries (c. 1600-1400 BC), with some metal reaching mainland