Credited to Bulgaria. Ai Bunar is roughly contemporary with the Rudna Glava mine in Serbia, so neither can be called the single first copper mine in Europe. Both are counted among the earliest.
How it began
Ai Bunar is a prehistoric copper mine north of Stara Zagora in Bulgaria. Pottery found in the workings is characteristic of the sixth layer of the Karanovo tell and dates the mining to the late 5th millennium BCE. Copper objects and ore chemically matched to Ai Bunar were found at settlements of the Karanovo V period, at the beginning of the 5th millennium BCE, and some evidence suggests use as early as the end of the 6th millennium. The miners belonged to a prehistoric culture on the territory of present-day Bulgaria. The mine is roughly contemporary with Rudna Glava in Serbia.
How it works
The miners dug narrow open trenches that followed veins of copper carbonate minerals into the hills. Their tools, found in the workings, were antler picks and stone mauls, along with two shaft-hole copper tools. The remains of three people were also found in the trenches. At the contemporary Serbian mine of Rudna Glava, miners cracked the rock by lighting fires against the face and then throwing water on it, and they built stone walls from debris to hold back collapses.
How it spread
Chemical analyses by E. N. Chernykh, Noel Gale and Bulgarian specialists traced Ai Bunar copper, as objects and as ore, to several settlement sites in south-central Bulgaria. This showed that ore and metal from one mine were distributed to communities some distance away. A study of early European copper places the first mining of copper ores, the earliest smelting around 5000 BCE and a metallurgical boom in the mid 5th millennium all in the southeastern Balkans.
What lasted
Investigations since the late 1960s at Ai Bunar and Rudna Glava reshaped the understanding of early copper mining in the Late Neolithic and Early Copper Age of the Balkans. They revealed how complex early metallurgical techniques were and tied copper exploitation to wider social and economic change. The mineral database Mindat lists the site as one of the earliest pieces of evidence for European copper mining and metallurgy.
