Metallurgy during the Copper Age in Europe

Recent archaeology has found that the metal was not introduced so gradually and that this entailed significant social changes, such as developments in the type of habitation (larger villages, launching of fortifications), long-distance trade, and copper metallurgy.

[1] 3rd millennium BCE copper metalwork is attested in places like Palmela (Portugal), Cortes (Navarre), and Stonehenge (England).

The eye-catching look of native copper makes it easy to recognize, and even flashier if converted into jewelry, a possible motivation for humankind to start metallurgy with it.

In fact, one of the possible explanations about what Ötzi the Iceman, the ancient mummy found in the Alps who lived around 3300 years BCE, was doing at 3,210 metres (10,530 ft) of altitude is that he could have been prospecting for new ores of minerals.

Numerous examples of mines are known all over Europe,[11] from the east: Rudna Glava (Serbia), Ai Bunar (Bulgaria); to the west: Mount Gabriel (Ireland), Great Orme, Alderley Edge (United Kingdom); crossing Central Europe: Mitterberg (Salzach, Austria), Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Cabrierés (France); to the south: Riotinto, Mola Alta de Serelles (Spain); and the Mediterranean: Corsica, Cyprus, and the Cyclades islands.

It is remarkable that, usually, it is not a single mine but a complex, with a variable, large number of mineshafts, as in Rudna Glava (30) or Mount Gabriel (31).

For example, at Mount Gabriel, it was estimated that they extracted the astonishing number of 32,570.15 tonnes (35,902.44 tons) of rock, gangue and ore.

They make a great fire of wood in the bottom of their rakes which were always open up on that account, and when the rock was sufficiently hot they cast water upon it, which shiver’d it; and then with stone wedges, which they drove in with other stones, they work’d their way through the hardest rocks, tho’ but slowly.The tools employed are mainly presented in Lewis' observations, but other ones have been recovered in archaeological context: The information available about the people of the Copper Age has not substantially increased along with the number of archaeological sites.

As the period moved forward, especially around the 3rd millennium, new and complex realities would appear strongly linked to the metal, like the impressive fortified villages of Los Millares (Spain), Vila Nova de Sao Pedro (Portugal) or the more modest cairn next to Copa Hill in the United Kingdom destinated to control the centres of extraction, or the equally and generalized cultural phenomenons of Megalithism, Rock Art, Bell Beakers Vessels that are known from Scandinavia to the South of Spain and from Scotland to Turkey.