Overview

The Great Orme copper mine on the coast of north Wales is one of the largest surviving Bronze Age mines in Europe. But where did all the copper go? Until now this remained something of a mystery. It was claimed in the 1990s that the mine only produced a low impurity type of copper that was uncommon in the British Bronze Age. These claims had marginalised the mine as an unimportant copper source, whose extensive workings were explained away as being merely the result of small-scale workings over nearly a thousand years. However, the results of this new interdisciplinary research, which combines archaeological and geological knowledge with the latest scientific analytical methods, radically changes that picture. This new evidence reveals a copper mine of European importance, which dominated Britain's copper supply for two centuries (c. 1600-1400 BC), with some metal reaching mainland Europe - from Brittany to as far as the Baltic. This zenith period of large-scale production is very likely to have required a full-time mining community at the mine, possibly supported or controlled by the agriculturally richer area of northeast Wales with its strategic links into wider communication networks. Overall, the new evidence suggests that Britain was far more integrated into European trade/exchange networks than was previously suspected. Once the richest parts of the mine were exhausted, there followed a twilight period of minor production that lasted several centuries.

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9781803273785

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'This is a landmark study concerning the origins of mining and metallurgy in Britain. Alan Williams has turned his PhD thesis into a scholarly publication that provides the reader with a compelling narrative based upon thorough fieldwork, a good understanding of geology, and an insightful study of the mineralogy, chemistry, and isotopic composition of the ores available to Bronze Age miners.' – Simon Timberlake (2023): Current Archaeology

Author Information

Alan Williams completed his PhD in 2018 on the Great Orme Bronze Age copper mine in Wales in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, where he is an Honorary Research Fellow. He originally graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Mining Geology from the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London, and after initially working in metal mining and exploration he had a long research career with the international glass company, Pilkington (now NSG). He was head of the Raw Materials and Glass Compositions Department at the company's international research centre and was responsible for glass-making raw materials in over 20 countries. Since taking early retirement in 2012 he has been applying his expertise in geochemistry, ore geology, mineralogy and pyrotechnology to important archaeological challenges in the field of prehistoric metal mining and smelting. He has written several papers and three books on historic and prehistoric metal mining areas in Britain and Ireland. He also has a long-standing interest in Bronze Age tin since working at Wheal Jane tin mine in Cornwall as a student geologist over 40 years ago. With Dr Ben Roberts, he has initiated the Leverhulme funded Project Ancient Tin at Durham University where he is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology. He was awarded the Ben Cullen Prize in 2020 by the Antiquity Trust.

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