Malachite was the major mineralization of copper mined in the Middle East since
Late Neolithic times and smelted to metallic copper. The Egyptian New Kingdom
had huge copper mining works in the Sinai and in the Arabah (Timna etc)mining
mainly malachite. All these is published information (see f.i B. Rothenberg,
ed. The Ancient Metallurgy of Copper, London, 1990 ; recently A.Hauptmann, Zur
fruehen Metallurgie des Kupfers in Fenan/Jordanien, Bochum, 2000). Beno
Rothenberg [log in to unmask]
David Killick wrote:
> As I am probably the only African archaeologist lurking on this list, I
> must offer the following corrections to Tony Brewis's message.
>
> > One of the earliest "commercial" examples was the use of malachite
> > by the Zimbabwe Empire, which produced copper currency from
> > malachite deposits at Kansanshi and Bwana Mkubwa.
>
> The Zambian Copperbelt was never within the Zimbabwe state, or even
> close to it; the typical cross-shaped copper ingots found at Great
> Zimbabwe and other sites on the Rhodesian plateau are traded goods. Nor
> was mining on the Copperbelt very early. Mike Bisson's excavations there
> didn't produce any radiocarbon dates earlier than ca.1000 AD, which is
> about the same time that the copper crosses start to show up in
> cemeteries in the Upemba region of south-eastern Zaire, about 200 km
> away.
>
> If you want early evidence of the mining of malachite you could look
> closer to home, at the Great Orme mine in north Wales, near Llandudno.
> Malachite (in a carbonate matrix) seems to have been the main ore here.
> Radiocarbon dates indicate mining from ca. 1300 BC. Incidentally, the
> mining of malachite on a small scale goes back beyond metallurgy to the
> use of the stone for pendants, beads, etc - as for example in the
> Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) of the Near East, ca 7000 BC.
> >
> > The "problem" of malachite for modern technology is that the flotation
> > process works best on sulphide minerals, so malachite is lost to tailings.
> > Some reagents will collect it, but generally the upper zones of ore which
> > contained it were known generally as "refractory" ores. In modern times
> > such ores were worked at the Aljoujt mine in Mauritania, between 1970
> > and 1983, using a furnace system known as TORCO ( Treatment Of
> > Refractory Copper Ores). Once the open-pit had worked its way through
> > the upper zone of ore, which graded 2.7% copper, the furnace was
> > closed down.
>
> It's actually the Akjoujt mine. Portions of this deposit were mined in
> the first millennium BC - radiocarbon dates run from about the 8th
> century BC to about the second century AD, but I am a bit suspicious of
> those prior to 500BC. There is some reason to suspect that mining here
> may have been stimulated by contacts with Carthaginians, as a
> Carthaginian fibula dated on stylistic grounds to the 5th century BC was
> recovered from a site nearby. Production was on a very small scale and
> ceased altogether by 200AD - we don't know why.
>
> Dave Killick
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|