Late Bronze Age copper mining in southern Iberia: preliminary results of fieldwork at Las Minillas (Granja de Torrehermosa, Badajoz, Spain)

• Autores: Mark A. Hunt Ortiz, Juan Latorre Ruiz, Miguel Angel de Dios Pérez, Jacobo Vázquez Paz, Magnus Artursson, Manuel Grueso Montero, Marta Díaz-Guardamino Uribe, Zofia A. Stos-Gale, Johan Ling
• Localización: Presenting Counterpoints to the Dominant Terrestrial Narrative of European Prehistory / coord. por John T. Koch, Mikael Fauvelle, Barry Cunliffe, Johan Ling, 2025, ISBN 9798888571859, págs. 167-186
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Evidence of Late Bronze Age copper mining in south-western Iberia is becoming relevant through archaeological investigations and compositional and lead isotopes result from objects from different areas of Northern Europe, although the mineral deposits of Iberia had been very poorly studied. The first results of the excavation campaigns carried out in the mine of Las Minillas (Granja de Torrehermosa, Badajoz, Spain) in 2020, 2022 and 2023 are presented and contextualized, providing key data on the dimension and characteristics of Late Bronze Age mining. During the interval 1300-1000 BC a large effort was made to extract the oxidized copper ore, resulting in a 200 m long trench-type mining work probably using fire-setting together with thousands of stone hammers, to gather an estimated copper quantity of between 0.26 and 0.78 tonners per year. It is hypothesized that Las Minillas, alongside other similar documented prehistoric mines in the area, could have played a key role in the copper supply system of yhe European Late Bronze Age, replacing the Great Orme mine (North Wales) as the main supplier of copper in Atlantic Europe at the end of the Bronze Age.