@article{40a1c026c0b44f30b04a8bbee1db6c3b,
title = "Copper mining and smelting technology in the northern Lowveld, South Africa, ca. 1000 CE to ca. 1880 CE",
abstract = "We report chemical, petrographic and metallographic studies of copper ores and slags recovered during sporadic surface surveys and excavations over the past fifty years in the Phalaborwa and Murchison Range areas of the northern Lowveld of South Africa. The copper slags around Phalaborwa have unusual mineral assemblages, attributable to the unique geochemistry of the main ore body, the Phalaborwa Complex, where copper minerals were mined from a carbonatite composed of magnetite, calcite and apatite. Strongly reducing conditions had to be avoided to minimise contamination of the copper with iron and phosphorus. As the copper ores contain almost no silicates, silica/alumina flux was added to produce slag. The Precambrian zinc-copper ores of the Murchison Range were also smelted, but during smelting any zinc that was not volatilised was taken up by minerals in the slag, so brass was not produced.",
keywords = "Archaeometallurgy, Copper, Mining, Slag, Smelting, South Africa, Technology",
author = "David Killick and Duncan Miller and Thondhlana, {Thomas Panganayi} and Marcos Martin{\'o}n-Torres",
note = "Funding Information: Our primary debt is to Emeritus Professor Nikolaas van der Merwe, who initiated the archaeological study of mining and metallurgy in the Lowveld in the 1960s; both Killick and Miller were his students at the University of Cape Town. We thank the Palabora Mining Company, the Maranda Mining Company, and too many farmers to mention individually, for access to their land. This work could not have been carried out without the generous help of Charles More, Ike Lombaard and Jan Scholtemeyer of Phalaborwa, all now deceased. Each of them shared their extensive knowledge of indigenous mining and metal working in the Lowveld. We also wish to thank the Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town (UCT); Professor W.J. Verwoerd; Professor Tom Huffman; Dr Julius Pistorius; and Dr Udo K{\"u}sel for allowing us access to materials under their care. For assistance in the analysis of samples we thank: at UCT, the Director, Electron Microscope Unit; and the Department of Geochemistry (and especially Dr A.R. Duncan and Dr J. Willis). At the University of Arizona, we especially thank Dr Ken Domanik for expert assistance with the electron microprobe. Dr Sergio Castro-Reino kindly examined ore samples from the Murchison copper-zinc deposits, and Dr Tom Fenn did the microprobe analyses of the samples from GM10M. Thomas Thondhlana is indebted to Professor Thilo Rehren for his support for the study of African archaeometallurgy, and gratefully acknowledges the assistance and technical advice that he received from Dr Shadreck Chirikure (UCT). Nikolaas van der Merwe's archaeological fieldwork at Phalaborwa in the 1960s and 1970s was funded by a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship and by National Science Foundation Grants GS-281 and GS-2744 . Thomas Thondhlana's fieldwork at Phalaborwa and laboratory study at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, was funded through the Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council , and grants from the Institute for Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies (IAMS) and the Xstrata Mining Company. Archaeometallurgical studies were funded by part of National Science Foundation Grant SBR- 9602033 to Killick, and by multiple grants to Miller from the South African National Research Foundation, Anglo American PLC, De Beers PLC, and AngloGold PLC. We are most grateful for their support. Opinions expressed in this report, and conclusions arrived at, are those of the authors and are not to be attributed to any of the supporting agencies. We also wish to express our gratitude to four anonymous reviewers for detailed comments on an earlier and much longer submission. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2016 Elsevier Ltd",
year = "2016",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.jas.2016.08.011",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "75",
pages = "10--26",
journal = "Journal of Archaeological Science",
issn = "0305-4403",
publisher = "Academic Press Inc.",
}