La production expérimentale de cuivre: des résultats significatifs.

Abstract

Reductions of various types of copper ores have been carried out on the experimental archaeology platform at the Melle silver mines since many years. The heating structure used for these experiments is as simple as possible, allowing to answer shared questions to cultural and historical contexts in which no archaeological remains of copper production have been found. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the process of extractive metallurgy applied to various copper ores enables to obtain metallic products in most cases. Elemental analyses carried out on the metals obtained reveal the production of relatively pure coppers.