Searching for Gold

This volume focusses on Bronze Age mining in the Balkan regions, presented in the regional and inter-regional context. The archaeological excavations on the Ada Tepe located in the Bulgarian Rhodopes are the point of departure, because not only did they bring to light one of the earliest known gold mines of Europe, but they also uncovered the mining areas, the work places and the adjacent settlement areas almost in their entirety – a singular case regarding gold mining sites of Bronze Age date. This provided an excellent opportunity to study Bronze Age metallurgy as well as its social and economic context in the Balkan regions as well as its connections with and dependence on exchange networks from the 3rd to the 1st millennia BCE. With the presentation of the strata and buildings on the Ada Tepe including artefacts and 14C-dates this key site of Bronze Age mining will be published for the first time in great detail. New research results on other Bronze Age sites in the eastern Balkan regions further contribute to our understanding of how those mining communities were economically and socially structured. The following chapters present the results of gold analyses conducted with the innovative laser ablation technique combined with mass spectrometry and other dedicated studies on copper and gold metallurgy in the regions of the Balkans, the Carpathian Basin and the Aegean. The final contributions treat inter-regional exchange of gold, silver, copper and other luxury goods between the Carpathian Basin and the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Middle East.