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
Iron Ore is visible on the surface as red streaks due to the rust. Once ancient peoples recognized that these rocks could be smelted or slagged into iron then they kept eyes open for them.
Mining for iron in Europe goes back as far as Roman times. The Romans actively mined for minerals, but mines were relatively shallow due to the difficulties of extracting water from the tunnels.
Much of medieval era iron though was *bog iron* which required wading through swamps to find the iron rich rocks.
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