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The Archaeometallurgy of Copper. Evidence from Faynan, Jordan.

ANDREAS HAUPTMANN. Pp 388. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, 2007. ISBN 978-3-540-72237-3. 106.95 euros.

Institute of Mineralogy and Mineral Resources, Technical University of Clausthal, Adolph-Roemer-Strasse 2A, 38678 Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

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The Faynan copper district in Jordan is one of the most important historic and long-lived mining sites in the Old World with a 9,000-year-history of copper ore (pigment) production, and 5,000 years of copper smelting from the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages to the Roman and Early Islamic periods. It is located in the Wadi Arabah, the Dead Sea rift-valley system that extends from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. Ongoing Cenozoic strike-slip movement has displaced the Faynan copper district 100 km northward, from the geologically identical and equally famous ancient Timna copper district along the Gulf of Aqaba in Israel. The copper deposits in the Faynan and Timna districts belong to the family of stratiform, sedimentary rock-hosted copper deposits. Host rocks are part of a transgressive Early Cambrian lagoonal sequence (conglomerate, sandstone, and dolomite) that overlies undeformed Late Proterozoic volcanic-arc rocks and Proterozoic crystalline basement, which are products of incipient rifting within the Arabian-Nubian craton at the western margin of Gondwanaland. The copper mineralization (mostly chrysocolla, with malachite, paratacamite, cuprite, and minor chalcocite) is strata bound and occurs over a few meters width in flat-lying arkosic sandstone, dolostone, and shale. Most of the copper mineralization is in a 1- to 1.5-m-thick . . . [Full Text of this Article]