Archaeologists say they have discovered an ancient tin mine in Turkey, a find that would debunk the long-held view that Bronze Age civilizations got their tin for smelting bronze through long-distance trade.
Two miles of tunnels in Turkey's Taurus Mountains were discovered in 1980 by K. Aslihan Yener of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and her colleagues. The tunnels are probably 5,000 years old, Yener said Monday.Yener said archaeologists have long known that craftsmen began mixing tin with copper to make bronze about 3000 B.C. "But for a long time, no one knew where the tin came from," she said.
Yener said it was believed that a bronze-based civilization arose only after the establishment of long-distance trade routes and commercial cities. Tin was available in Afghanistan and in Britain.
But in 1980, Yener discovered a series of tunnels at a site called Kestel. The tunnels, she found, followed veins of low-grade cassiterite, or tin ore.
"These tunnels were made by people who built fires to crack the surrounding limestone and then used stone battering rams to smash into the veins of cassiterite," Yener said. "There also are huge veins of hematite, an iron ore, in the same tunnels, but they didn't bother with it; they just tossed it down the slope."
Yener and her colleagues also discovered a nearby site called Goltepe, which she said was once a village where hundreds of people pulverized the ore with stone tools and smelted out the tin in earthenware crucibles.
Vincent C. Pigott, a specialist in the archaeology of metallurgy at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, said in Tuesday's New York Times that Yener's discovery is "a major step forward in understanding ancient metal technology."
But the archaeologists found only low-grade tin ore, the Times said, leading one expert to doubt they had found an actual mine.
"Almost every piece of granite has at least minute concentrations of tin in it," James D. Muhly, a professor of ancient Middle Eastern history at Penn, told the Times. "But was there enough for mining? I don't think they have found a tin mine."