Geochemical surveys reveal historic copper business in King Solomon’s mines didn’t pollute setting

A brand new research from Tel Aviv University overturns prevailing scientific beliefs that King Solomon’s Mines not solely harmed the well being of staff within the historic copper business but in addition pose dangers to the well being of contemporary residents residing close to the location.

In the brand new research, researchers performed geochemical surveys at copper manufacturing websites within the Timna Valley, courting again to the tenth century BCE and the period of the Biblical Kings David and Solomon. They discovered that the environmental air pollution ensuing from copper manufacturing was minimal and spatially restricted, posing no hazard to the area’s inhabitants both previously or immediately. Additionally, TAU’s archaeologists reviewed earlier research and located no proof that the traditional copper business polluted the planet.

The research was led by Prof. Erez Ben-Yosef, Dr. Omri Yagel, Willy Ondricek, and Dr. Aaron Greener from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and Archaeology, Tel Aviv University. The paper was printed within the journal Scientific Reports.

“We inspected two main copper manufacturing websites within the Timna Valley, one from the Iron Age and King Solomon’s period and one other close by that’s about 1,500 years older,” says Prof. Ben-Yosef.

“Our research was very in depth. We took a whole lot of soil samples from each websites for chemical analyses, creating high-resolution maps of heavy metallic presence within the area. We discovered that air pollution ranges on the Timna copper mining websites are extraordinarily low and confined to the areas of the traditional smelting furnaces.

“For occasion, the focus of lead—the first pollutant in metallic industries—drops to lower than 200 elements per million just some meters from the furnace. By comparability, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines industrial areas as secure for staff at 1,200 elements per million and residential areas as secure for youngsters at 200 elements per million.”

The new research contradicts a collection of papers printed for the reason that Nineties about air pollution induced allegedly by the traditional copper business.

Prof. Ben-Yosef explains, “We reveal that this isn’t true. Pollution in Timna could be very restricted spatially, and it is doubtless that solely these working immediately on the furnace suffered from inhaling poisonous fumes, whereas only a brief distance away, the soil is completely secure. Moreover, the match we discovered between the spatial distribution of copper and lead concentrations within the soil additional signifies that the metals are ‘trapped’ in slag and different industrial waste—which retains them from leaching into the soil and affecting crops or people.

“Our findings align with a number of current research from the Wadi Faynan area in Jordan, which additionally level to very low ranges of air pollution. Timna and Faynan are superb websites for such a analysis as a result of they haven’t been disturbed by trendy mining, as occurred in Cyprus, for instance, and because of their dry climates, the metals within the soil are usually not washed away.

“In Faynan, a staff led by Prof. Yigal Erel of the Hebrew University examined 36 skeletons of people that lived on the mining web site through the Iron Age, and solely three confirmed any hint of air pollution of their enamel. The relaxation had been utterly clear. We now current the same image for Timna.”

In addition to the geochemical survey, the TAU archaeologists additionally performed a complete evaluate of current literature, stating that hypotheses about world air pollution through the pre-Roman interval lack strong proof.

“There was a development within the Nineties, which offered historic copper manufacturing as the primary occasion of commercial air pollution,” explains Dr. Yagel, a number one researcher within the present research.

“Such statements seize headlines and appeal to analysis grants, however they unnecessarily venture trendy air pollution issues onto the previous. Moreover, the analysis literature tends to make use of the time period ‘air pollution’ to explain any hint of historic metallurgical exercise, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that metallic industries had been dangerous to people from their earliest beginnings—which is patently unfaithful.

“Even when metallic manufacturing was large-scale, changing into integral to human civilization, it was the poisonous lead business that induced world air pollution, not essentially different metals. A Nineties research argued that traces of copper present in Greenland ice cores had traveled by way of the environment from websites like Timna. This declare, nevertheless, has not been corroborated by any subsequent research.

“As researchers confront the extreme environmental challenges of our time, equivalent to local weather change, we frequently are inclined to seek for comparable issues previously or assume that environmental hurt has been an inevitable consequence of human exercise for the reason that agricultural revolution. However, we should be cautious. While we would label a number of items of slag on the bottom as ‘air pollution,’ we must always not confuse this localized waste with regional or world environmental air pollution.”