OUR FIRST MINING BOOM UNCOVERED
Study suggests Wales supplied copper on huge scale to Bronze Age Europe
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VERYONE knows that Wales was at the heart of the coal mining boom in the 18th and 19th century.
What most people don’t know was that it was the centre of another great mining boom 3,600 years before.
New research suggests that one tiny area of Wales supplied all of Britain and many parts of Europe with one of the most valuable metals of the day – copper.
New evidence suggests that Great Orme, near Llandudno, mined incredible amounts of copper ore on an industrial scale.
What makes this all the more incredible was that at the time even a village would have been considered enourmous. And yet this North Wales mine had trade routes reaching hundreds of miles across the continent of Euorpe.
Honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool Dr Alan Williams was one of the main researchers on this project.
He said: “At the time there were scattered farming communities. There were no towns and no villages. But here we had large-scale mining of around 100 people.
“It is quite an exceptional place. “There are some passages underground that only children could fit through, so children likely worked with their families. It is quite an irony that Llandudno was the place thousands of years later where miners would go for a holiday.”
Unlike most humans at the time, the people at the mine would not have grown their own food – instead they would have traded for it.
So why was copper so important? Copper is used for making bronze. Bronze is 90% copper and 10% tin. Cornwall was one of the few places that produced tin.
Dr Williams said: “The metal has been found in Sweden, Denmark, France and the Baltic. It is a big surprise that the metal went so far. There was a 200-year copper bonanza between 1600 to 1400 BC – it supplied the whole of Britain.
“They would have still had some left, so it was able to be exported. The Neolithic period before the Bronze age was without metal and the Bronze Age was 2400 BC to 800 BC.”
But how could people with very few metal tools and no modern equipment extract the copper?
According to Dr Williams, who coauthored a paper on the subject alongside Cécile Le Carlier de Veslud, they did this in several ways.
More than 2,400 hammerstones have been recovered – hard pebbles they would have brought up to the mines;
30,000 bone fragments, which are the remains of tools, have also been found;
some bronze found; and
fires were set against a rock face to heat the stone, which was then doused with liquid, causing the stone tools have been to fracture by thermal shock. This is a process know as firesetting and is a well-known ancient technique.
Dr Williams added: “The evidence for a boom period, with metal reaching from Brittany to the Baltic, suggests that Britain was much more linked into European Bronze Age trade networks than previously suspected by archaeologists despite Britain at that time having very few settlements of any size.”
In the past the mine was thought to be large because of small-scale workings over almost one thousand years (1700-800 BC), but only supplying the local area with copper.
The new research shows that there was in fact a period of two centuries (1600-1400 BC) when there was such intensive large-scale production that it supplied not only the whole of Britain – and parts of Ireland – but also regions of Europe stretching from France to Sweden.
The 200 years of large-scale productio – the boom – is thought to have been from the very rich ores in the centre of the mine and was followed by several more centuries of very minor production – the bust – on the thin minor ore veins that were left – maximum hard work, but producing very little copper and supplying only the local area.