I have found lots of information on ancient smelting and forging of metal, but precious little on how these ancient people actually found the metal to work with. Most information points to meteor iron and bog/swamp iron, which yielded very small amounts. How did they (or did they even) prospect for iron veins in the earth, well before the invention of things like metal detectors.
In: Technology
People don’t use metal detectors today to prospect for iron ore. Iron is actually quite easy to find – it’s almost always in an oxyde or sulphite form, and the soil around deposits will reflect that by coloration. How did they know that red soil leads to iron? Because previously they used bronze, and before that copper and noticed that certain minerals indicate metal presence – copper appears in elemental but also other forms, and needed heating to figure out; once you discovered that certain rocks yield metal, you’d experiment with that other rocks that looks red, and the one that looks black etc etc etc.
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