Central and Eastern Europe

This survey of prehistoric copper mines in Europe began with the oldest known examples, namely Rudna Glava and Ai Bunar in the Balkans. It is now time to consider some of the largest Bronze Age mines, which were major producers of copper that influenced its supply across large parts of the continent. Much of the focus is on Austria, where the earliest scientific investigations of early copper mines were undertaken in Europe. The earliest use of copper in central Europe can be linked to a Late Neolithic culture called the Münchshöfen group, best known in south-eastern Bavaria. A small number of copper objects can be associated with this culture group, including axe-hammers and flat axes, awls, beads, and rings. Scientific analysis of these objects reveals that they probably originated in the Balkans, as part of a spread of metal use into central Europe from that area during the second half of the fifth millennium BC (Höppner et al. 2005). This is supported by the material culture of the Münchshöfen group, in particular the ceramic evidence, which finds close typological parallels with metal-using groups in the Carpathian Basin. It is likely that the same spread of copper use into Austria and southern Germany eventually led to the first attempts to exploit the copper resources of the Alpine region. The evidence comes from the hill-top settlement of Mariahilfbergl near Brixlegg in the Inn Valley of North Tyrol, Austria. Excavation uncovered traces of metallurgical processes in the form of a fireplace with fragments of copper slag, two clay nozzles, and two items of copper metal (Bartelheim et al. 2002, 2003). Radiocarbon analysis indicates a 4500–3640 BC date range, however, the wider cultural context of the site may place these discoveries in the later fifth millennium BC. It is not certain whether smelting took place in this site, though some of the slag-like material suggests the heat treatment of a type of fahlore (tetrahedrite) that is common in the Brixlegg area. Interestingly, chemical and lead isotope analyses of a copper bead and copper strip from the same site context revealed a different chemical composition from that of the slag, one that matches with copper metalwork from Bulgaria and Serbia (Pernicka et al. 1997).

Ancient history · Archaeology · Bronze · Bronze Age · Chalcolithic · Excavation · Geography · Human settlement · Parallels · Prehistory · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Engineering · History · Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts · Mineralogy and Gemology Studies

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