Colour Mines.

Gill Juleff 

When we talk about the legacy or heritage of mining we conjure images from a highly visible past industrial era. These may be of either the nostalgic and heroic silhouettes of great buildings and engineered structures from an era of new wealth, or the painful scars of poverty and wounded landscapes. As an archaeologist of mining and metallurgy, when I think of the heritage of mining I cast my mind much further back in time, many thousands of years, to when people first engaged with those places in the landscape where they could see and gather dense, brightly-coloured rocks, and humanity began a deep and enduring relationship with the mineral world. At first, these places were sources of trinkets, idiosyncrasies of nature that could be carried home to camp, to be bartered and exchanged and in time to become the starting materials for beads or pigments. The blues and greens of copper minerals, or the reds, oranges and earth ochres of iron, the blue of lapis and the glister of gold. The value of these minerals lay not only in their integral beauty but also in their origin. The places in the landscape where they could be found might be marked by distinct features of topography, the lay of the land, or changes in vegetation, perhaps attracting wild animals, or repelling them. Whatever their characteristics, these places would become important, possibly sacred, or secret to only a few. We could then consider these first mineral places as ‘colour mines’. Over millennia, familiarity with the behaviour of these minerals led to their transformation, in the presence of fire, into new materials. The great, slow-motion, technological leap forward into metallurgy changed forever the social world of humans.

Over the passage of time people have exercised choice in where and how they engage with their environment. Where to farm, where to settle and create villages, towns and cities. There are few environments that have constrained humankind. Even though you can only be a fisherman in the sea, you have a multitude of choices on how and where you access the sea. The landscapes we see around us today are shaped by these choices. Perhaps only the mineral landscape imposes limitations on our choices. We can only mine where the minerals occur and miners can only live where minerals can be mined. And across the world these places are sparsely distributed. We can list where copper, or tin, or gold, and the rare minerals that often accompany them, can be found. This concept fascinates me. It means that miners must return to the same places generation after generation, millennia after millennia, to search for the same minerals. We now have new tools to search with and we can probe deeper into the earth but in doing in so we are very likely to encounter along the way evidence of these ancestral miners. They may be from the first chalcolithic era, the Bronze Age, Roman or Medieval times. The marks they have left on rock faces and the tools they abandoned tell us about how they worked and who they were. How, like us, they sought out the richest minerals and took away the least overburden. This scant and precious evidence can only be found at the mine and it is vulnerable to the work of all the miners who come later and who have the option to respect or destroy it. 

There is hardly a culture in the world that doesn’t have a name for these ‘old men’s workings’ that chart the lives of grandfathers, great-grandfathers and generations of ancestors. Visiting a Mao-era mercury mining complex in China, restored as a theme park attraction, it is possible to find just meters away from a vast mining cavern now used as a brightly-lit wedding venue, small pockets in the rock face created by fire-setting, one the oldest known mining techniques. On close inspection, the same can be found in mines across the old world from Iran and Anatolian Turkey, the Balkans the Alps and Iberia, to the Atlantic fringes of Britain and Ireland.

Some decades ago I would have despaired that any of this valuable legacy could survive the brutalist plunder known as modern mining. But our planet is changing and we are revaluing our relationship with our environment. With innovation and sensitivity we have opportunities to reconnect with our mining forefathers of a deeper past, and hear their stories.

Of Earth For Earth (2020)

GILL JULEFF

Metals and minerals are embedded in my DNA. Brought up on a farm in Cornwall in a family with as many miners as farmers, I was always more interested in the names of ruined engine houses dotted across the landscape than learning how to keep chickens. I was captivated by stories of mines in Brazil, South Africa, Australia and California where relatives went to seek their fortunes. I first left home for Art College where, primarily through social contacts, I discovered archaeology. Good fortune gained me an undergraduate place at the Institute of Archaeology in London where the study of archaeometallurgy captured my curiosity. An opportunity for a year’s work experience with UNESCO in Sri Lanka turned into 13 glorious years of adventure, including PhD research and the discovery of a novel 1st millennium iron smelting technology that utilised powerful monsoon winds to create high-carbon steel. Returning to UK and Exeter University, I continue to work on iron in Asia with research colleagues in India, China and Japan but I have also rekindled my local interests in both the archaeology of mining and the social history of mining communities.