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| A typical example of a mineshaft. | |
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Two of the oldest copper mines in Europe come from the Balkans. In Serbia, there is the Rudna Glava belonging to the Vinča culture who we have discussed not
once, but
twice here on the blog and in the podcast. The discovery of these mines have changed the way we think of the Neolithic and the Chalcolithic periods of European history by pushing back European usage of copper by a thousand years or more.
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| Vinča Copper Idol |
Both the Prehistoric Serbians and Bulgarians dug trenches into the mountain or hillside to extract the copper by use of stone and bone or antler tools. Once they found it they broke off some of the large rocks containing the copper by heating it up and then pouring water over it to crack the rock. Then they would extract the copper and take it somewhere to smelt the copper out and make artifacts.
The Vinča were accustomed to digging their houses into the hillside and the banks of the Danube so it only makes sense that these guys would employ the same technique to extract copper. Because the Vinča had a rich social life that showed some of the early evidence of River gods and goddesses worship it seems natural that idols would be made of this new, shiny metal that they were learning to work.
I don't know, in ancient time how they find (extracted) copper. Nowadays for extracting copper , equations, chemicals.
ReplyDeleteHow they found those metals ?
In ancient times there were two ways of finding copper. The first and easiest way was using what they call native copper. Copper is one of the most abundant metals on earth. In ancient times it was so abundant they could find it on the ground like a common rock. This was the copper they first used and called native copper. They learned how to mold it, first just by banging it up with rocks and bone tools to shape it. Then they discovered it was easier to shape when you heated it up with fire. Then, people discovered copper was found in other rocks when they were digging, either to make homes or because there happened to be a lot of copper on the surface. Then what they did to extract copper in the ground was to heat it up with some fire and pour cool water over the rocks that had copper in it. This would cause the rocks to split and they would take large chunks to the surface. From there they could repeat this process until they were able to get the copper and the rocks completely separate. Then they could mold the copper in a whole bunch of different ways.
DeleteSorry, the link given in above comment is not correct. extraction of copper
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ReplyDeleteOk,
ReplyDeletebut we too digs, we dont even find copper dust.
Is all of the copper is disappeared from earth's surface.
Thanks for u r reaply
Maybe not all of it, but the metal is generally found in other rocks or found in an impure or mixed state with other metals. Even back in this time period you have mines like ones Egyptians used that dug as far deep as 30 meters to get to the copper. Mining today gets much further into the earth's surface and rocks in order to extract the copper for modern usage.
DeleteThanks
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