Every metal marks a romantic chapter in human history.
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As a result of their affinity for silver, lead deposits were eagerly sought in ancient times. The Greek mines at Laurium operating well before 3000 B.C. and the mines of the Iberian Peninsula beginning during the Iron Age are both celebrated for their contributions to the wealth of nations. Likewise, ancient Persian kings owed their legendary wealth to abundant lead/silver deposits. A breakthrough for extracting silver from lead ores, called cupellation, appeared around 3500 B.C. and greatly enhanced the popularity of silver. By the third millennium B.C., silver taken from lead ore had become the chief unit of exchange in the Near East, and the technology rapidly spread to other parts of the Old World. Cupellation remained the dominant process for silver recovery for nearly 5000 years, an important consideration in using archived lead in bogs and other deposits for paleoenvironmental detective work. By my estimate, annual production was about 160, 900, 11,000, 32,000, and 6000 metric tons during the Copper, Bronze, Iron, Roman, and Barbaric ages, respectively. Total production to 1000 A.D. is estimated at 32 million tons. Singer estimated that about 134 million tons of lead was discovered in the Old World throughout recorded history. Thus, about 24% of the discovered lead reserves were mined in ancient times, a more reasonable figure than previous higher rates.
Progress in lead. Logarithmic plot of historical lead production over time.
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Another arena for massive growth was in the production of coinage Duncan-Jones reckoned that by the middle of the second century there were 7000 million HS of silver coins in circulation, which was roughly four times my estimate of the volume of Roman coins in circulation in the middle of the last century ВСЕ. And the volume of Roman coinage had already grown ten times in the century before that Perhaps. But confirmation of the huge volume of Roman silver-lead mining (silver was produced by cupellation as a by product of lead-mining) comes impressively from an apparently incontrovertible source
I refer of course to the Greenland Icecap, and the peat bogs or lake sediments of Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. A whole series of recent studies from a variety of sites have shown with remarkable concordance that the volume of wind-borne contaminants from smelting mineral ores reached a significant peak in the Roman period. Hong and associates showed that lead pollution from systematic samples of the Greenland icecap, datable to between 500 ВСЕ and 300 CE, reached densities four times the natural (i.e. prehistoric) levels. Renberget aL showed that lead contamination in a wide assortment of sediments from southern Swedish lakes reached a peak in or around the first century CE. Shotyk et aL showed from a study of a Swiss peat bog that there was a huge upsurge in lead pollution from the first century ВСЕ to the third century CE, when pollution (and presumably production) began to decline.
There seems little doubt among these investigators that the main source of contamination in this period was lead smelting and cupellation for silver and copper in the Roman empire, and particularly Spain. Hong and associates showed that copper production in the world rose sevenfold in the last five centuries ВСЕ, continued at a high but reducing level in the first five centuries CE and then fell sevenfold to reach a trough in the thirteenth century. Once again they are convinced that classical civilizations, and in particular the Roman empire was the major source of this wind-borne pollution.