role in producing the raw materials that may save the Earth and its occupants in the centuries to come. In the circumstances I am hopeful this book will help newcomer and expert alike to understand the history of this great industry and therefore play a useful part in providing the context that often improves decision making.
To end with another movie analogy, some may remember Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle’s startling but less well-known film Sunshine. In the film, a lifesaving heat shield that protects a huge spaceship on a mission to re-fire the dying Sun has taken much of the world’s molybdenum to provide the shield’s protection. This allows the ship to get near enough to the Sun to launch a nuclear device, as large as Manhattan, which had absorbed all of the world’s fission material. The explosion of this device is intended to reverse the star’s decline. So to save the world the ship’s shield must have moly to stop it melting as it nears the sun and uranium for the bomb needed to re-ignite the Sun. Science fiction maybe, but underlying it is a truth about the critical role that metals, and therefore mining, play in the life and destiny of our planet, as they have done throughout history.
M.C.
1. The Stone Age
In the beginning
Precision in identifying the various stages of the Stone Age is difficult to achieve but much evidence has accumulated over the years, often as a result of advanced archaeological work, that suggests man developed basic skills at a very early stage in his existence. Amongst those skills was the ability to use what materials were available to fashion tools and then weapons, the latter probably first to kill animals for food and then, as tribes and communities came into contact with each other, to make weapons for defence and attack. It is now accepted that even early man was capable of structured thought, albeit of a fairly basic kind, and this enabled him to identify raw materials that he needed which had to be extracted from the earth. Thus mining was probably one of the earliest of man’s industrial activities.
The Stone Age is quite difficult to date, certainly on the basis of the development of societies. The society that explorers found in Australia in the 17th century was still essentially Stone Age in that its primary tools and weapons were made from stone. However, the Bronze Age, when man began to mine and work metal for the first time, arrived in Asia, Europe and north Africa at the latest around 2500 BC, and probably the advance from the Stone Age started rather earlier than that, around 4000 BC. The earliest post Stone Age societies were to be found in the Middle East and SE Asia and were earlier again, around 6000 BC. But as we will see mining per se started long before man became aware of the industrial potential of metal.
Tools and weapons
The first tools and weapons that prehistoric man used were made of stone. Over the centuries archaeologists have discovered a large number of these ancient and rudimentary objects, and have had a great deal of fun in working out what function the different shaped tools fulfilled. They have also had to speculate as to how these stones were acquired – were they picked up off the ground or were some of them perhaps mined?
It seems probable that many of the tools were shaped from stones found lying on the ground but it is also likely that rock formations would have attracted the attention of ancient man when he was looking for a particular shaped stone for use as a tool or weapon. It is also a subject of some discussion as to whether ancient man actually acquired stone in a manner that we would recognise today as mining, but there have been a number of sites uncovered by archaeologists that suggest very early organised mining.
Mining
One of the most famous ancient mines is Lion Cave in Swaziland in Africa. The site in the Ngwenya Mountains became a modern day iron ore mine, but before that in the late 1960s evidence of a serious ancient mining operation was uncovered. Further work by a team of geologists discovered a tunnel which went about 50 feet into the side of the hill. Inside it was found that whoever had created the tunnel had clearly done so to access specularite, a form of iron ore that smears and would have been used as a cosmetic for personal adornment. When it came to dating the cave, the final calculation suggested that it could have been dug around 40,000 BC, which would make it perhaps the oldest underground mine yet discovered.
Widespread evidence has been found of the usage of red ochre (haematite) in this period; in the modern world it is an important iron ore but in the ancient world it was primarily used as a pigment for cosmetics and for cave paintings. It is also believed that it was used in primitive religious rituals as a powder, its red colour perhaps symbolising blood. Ochre has been found at ancient sites as far distant from each other as Tanzania, the Czech Republic, France and Spain, with evidence in some locations of a basic crushing process to make ochre powder.
Quarrying activities go back even further, to as early as 60,000 years ago. In Egypt’s Nile Valley a number of flint diggings have been found, an important building material that was used in making sharp tools in the Stone Age and before. Flint workings in the form of ground scraping have also been uncovered in England at Beer in Devon, where outcrops of the valuable stone were found. The Egyptian workings at Nazlet Khater 4 in the western Nile Valley of Upper Egypt between Asyut and Sawhaj were particularly interesting. Work done in 1982 showed that ancient miners exploited the site at least 33,000 years ago. The miners were seeking flint and had sufficient geological knowledge to know that there was a flint seam overlain by silt, sand and gravel. The flint seam could be seen outcropping on the surface before plunging under the silt and sand, and the miners had dug a 30-foot by 7-foot trench and seven vertical shafts to reach the flint.
Although it is beyond the scope of this book to stray into the area of anthropology, it is nonetheless interesting to note that some of the dating of this basic mining activity goes back beyond the time when the forerunner of modern man appeared, generally thought to be between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. It is thought that some of the mining activity was carried out by Neanderthal man, or fossil man. Such people were generally thought to be pre-human and thus incapable of any sort of sophisticated activity such as mining, as it was suspected that they would have been unable to instigate the planning necessary to develop a mine successfully. Some anthropologists thus believe that the uncovering of ancient mining activity has thrown new light on the issue of when recognisable humans appeared on Earth.
2. The Bronze Age
As with the Stone Age, the Bronze Age is difficult to pin down in terms of dates, particularly as there is strong evidence that stone weapons and tools were still being used when man had begun to smelt and fashion copper into weapons, creating an extended passage of time from the Stone to the Bronze Age. It is also the case that gold was well known in the Bronze Age, so whilst we tend to define the period as one where there was a major technological breakthrough enabling copper to be alloyed with tin to create bronze for weapons and metallic items, the mining and usage of other metals, including lead and zinc, went on in tandem.
It is also the case that copper objects were found long before the onset of the Bronze Age; the oldest found, a copper pendant from Shanidar in Iraq, is believed to date from around 6500 BC. Such copper objects were unlikely to have been made with mined metal but would have been worked using native copper picked up off the ground.
The Bronze Age is usually split into periods which depend on the area of the world being discussed. The early Bronze Age in the Near East, then far more advanced culturally and technologically than Europe, began around 3500 BC and the final stage, the late Bronze Age, ended around 1200 BC when the Iron Age began to emerge. In Europe the Bronze Age continued in some places up until 700 BC. The early Bronze Age also saw the invention of writing in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), which helped provide the means for chronicling the development of society and commercial life.
Gold is mentioned, along with silver, in the Code of Menes which was promulgated by King Menes of Memphis – effectively the first Egyptian Pharaoh – in around 3100 BC. It is probable that there was knowledge of gold for millennia before because the sight of gold nuggets gleaming in alluvial settings must have