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Inside Hallstatt’s Salt Mountain, Iron Age Miners Left a 300-Meter Underground Archive
Exploratory drilling in Austria’s prehistoric Hallstatt salt mine has identified an extensive Iron Age mining complex made up of enormous chambers arranged beside and above one another. Their floors preserve tools, clothing, food remains and biological traces left by miners around 2,500 years ago, effectively turning the underground workings into an archive of prehistoric labor.…
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Prehistoric Fires in a Pyrenees Cave May Reveal One of Europe’s Earliest High-Altitude Copper Mining Sites
Cave 338 sits more than 2,200 meters above sea level in the eastern Pyrenees, where prehistoric visitors left behind fires, bones, ornaments and nearly 200 fragments of green stone. The cave, located near Queralbs in Girona, Spain, close to the French border, may now offer one of the clearest early records of high-altitude copper mineral…