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Rio Tinto, Garfield, Utah [10] Freeport McMoRan, Miami, Arizona [11] The United States is a net exporter of copper ore and copper concentrate. In 2015, out of 1.25 million metric tons of recoverable copper metal extracted from mines, 320,000 tons of copper were exported in the form of ore and concentrate, to be smelted and refined elsewhere.
In North America, copper mining began with marginal workings by Native Americans. Native copper is known to have been extracted from sites on Isle Royale with primitive stone tools between 800 and 1600. [12] Copper metallurgy was flourishing in South America, particularly in Peru around 1000 AD; it proceeded at a much slower rate on other ...
Sican tumi, or ceremonial knife, Peru, 850–1500 CE. Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America is the extraction, purification and alloying of metals and metal crafting by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century.
In South America a copper mask dated to 1000 BC found in the Argentinian Andes is the oldest known copper artifact discovered in the Andes. [115] Peru has been considered the origin for early copper metallurgy in pre-Columbian America , but the copper mask from Argentina suggests that the Cajón del Maipo of the southern Andes was another ...
Copper mining also produces gold and silver as byproducts. [2] Byproduct molybdenum from copper mining makes Arizona the nation's second-largest producer of that metal. Although copper mineralization was found by the earliest Spanish explorers of Arizona, the territory was remote, and copper could seldom be profitably mined and shipped.
The copper deposits occur in rocks of Precambrian age, in a thick sequence of northwest-dipping sandstones, conglomerates, ash beds, and flood basalts associated with the Keweenawan Rift. The native copper deposits originate in fissures, steeply dipping veins or in the amygdaloid top portion of the Portage Lake Lava Series lava tops and ...
Copper bells, axe heads and ornaments from various parts of Chiapas (1200–1500) on display at the Regional Museum in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas.. The emergence of metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica occurred relatively late in the region's history, with distinctive works of metal apparent in West Mexico by roughly 800 CE, and perhaps as early as 600 CE. [1]
Native metals were prehistoric man's only access to metal, since the process of extracting metals from their ores is thought to have been discovered around 6500 BC. However, native metals could be found only in impractically small amounts, so while copper and iron were known well before the Copper Age and Iron Age , they did not have a large ...