Abstract
The research aims to determine the morphology and preliminary dating of the ancient mine Starodubtseva Yama. The mine is located 250 km southwest of Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was first identified with geological prospecting, and then in 2020, it was surveyed during a geoarchaeological expedition. The main research methods included a description of the geomorphological position of the ore occurrence, a topographic survey of the mine, and excavation of test pits along the edges of the site. The ore occurrence is confined to the central part of the Kulikovsky ultramafic massif; schlieren accumulations of copper-magnetite ores in serpentinites are noted. The ancient mine is an oval depression of 16 m × 13 m and up to 2 m deep, surrounded by a ring of dumps up to 1 m high from the modern surface; the diameter along the outer circle of the dumps is 30–35 m. Geomorphological features, its localization within the distribution zone of metal-producing communities of the Late Bronze Age, and the proximity to the Novotemirsky mine allow preliminary dating of the Starodubtseva Yama mine to the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BC.
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Acknowledgements
The work is funded by RSF project № 21-78-20015 “Technologies of mining and metallurgical production of the Bronze Age in the evolution of a cultural-historical landscape in the Ural region”.
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Ankusheva, P.S., Alaeva, I.P., Ankushev, M.N., Artemyev, D.A., Bazhenov, E.A., Yuminov, A.M. (2022). Starodubtseva Yama—A New Ancient Mine of the Southern Trans-Urals Steppes. In: Ankusheva, N., Chechushkov, I.V., Stepanov, I., Ankushev, M., Ankusheva, P. (eds) Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Mineralogy. Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86040-0_15
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