Archaeologists Find 5,500-Year-Old Copper-Working Clues in Spain’s Cave 338

5 articles · Updated · Smithsonian Magazine · May 8

Four occupation layers in Cave 338 show repeated human visits, with the two middle layers—dated 5,500 to 3,000 years ago—yielding hearths, jewelry, children’s bones and green mineral fragments thought to be malachite.
Burned pieces of the mineral, which does not occur naturally in the cave, suggest people carried it up into the high Pyrenees and deliberately heated it as part of copper processing.
The finds challenge the long-held view that prehistoric communities rarely used high-altitude Pyrenean sites, instead pointing to short, recurrent stays rather than permanent settlement.
Children’s bones indicate the cave may also have had burial or ritual use, while researchers are still testing the mineral’s identity and searching for a nearby mining source.

Was this high-altitude Pyrenees cave a prehistoric mining camp, a sacred burial site for children, or both?

What secrets of early metalworking will be revealed when archaeologists analyze the cave's minerals this summer?

How did ancient communities pass down the knowledge of a remote mountain cave's resources across four millennia?