Abstract
The Celtic culture of Western Europe left magnificent gold objects, such as jewellery and weapons from nobility graves and hoarded coins, as well as field evidence of pre-Roman gold mining and metallurgical workshops that attest to the mining of local ores. This is the case of Central France where many precious metallic ores have been mined throughout the ages from the Prehistoric times onwards. One of the lingering problems in assessing the provenance of gold artefacts and coins is the lack of relevant data on the isotope geochemistry and mineralogy of ore sources. Forty gold ores samples were collected and studied from Limousin (French Massif Central), a very significant gold mining district from the Celtic times. Their Pb isotope compositions clearly show a local dichotomy i.e. two distinct groups of ores, one of Late Proterozoic to Early Paleozoic Pb model age and another associated to Variscan ages and consistent with field relationships, mineralogy and elemental analyses. The use of Cu and Ag isotopes, and their coupling with Pb isotopes, will refine the tracing of future metal provenance studies, but also highlight some metallurgical practices like deliberate metal additions to gold artefact or debasement of gold coins. The newly acquired Pb, Ag, and Cu isotopic data on gold ores improves our understanding of ore deposits geology and provide clarifications on the provenance of Celtic gold from this area and its economic importance.
Highlights
Gold and silver coins and gold artefacts from early Bronze Age to Antiquity have been discovered in burial sites and hoards throughout Europe[1,2,3]
More than 250 Prehistoric gold mining sites (Fig. 1a), including over 1100 opencast individual mines operated by the Celtic tribe known as Lemovices were identified in Limousin[16,26] (Fig. 1b–d)
The label ‘A’ refers to the gold ore samples exploited by the ancient miners and the label ‘M’ to those of the modern mining sites
Summary
Gold and silver coins and gold artefacts from early Bronze Age to Antiquity have been discovered in burial sites and hoards throughout Europe[1,2,3]. The data available in the geological literature is not precise enough for these purposes because it is not representative for the ores exploited by the ancients This data is very useful in order to place a particular study area in a given geodynamic context and to reject some geographical ore sources, but it does not provide an accurate geochemical signature for regional archaeological and historical issues. This paper’s objective is to provide a geochemical and mineralogical background, including Pb, Cu and Ag isotopic compositions on ore samples collected at surface and in underground mining workings known to have supported gold metal production during Celtic times (Lemovices tribe). Our expectation is that the new body of data will provide a firm reference for archaeometallurgical studies of Celtic gold, while adding new elements for the understanding of ore deposits in Western Europe
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