Cabrières is the home of the oldest French copper mines, and the oldest prehistoric copperworks currently known in Europe.
Together, they give a unique perception of the entire production line. Small mines, dug into the ground, allowed the copper to be extracted and then transformed into metal at the copperworks on the surface. 5000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, the peasant farmers of the Languedoc acquired the techniques for making this, the first metal.

The crude techniques used were far from exact. External sources, notably from the Middle East (a region where copper production was developed 2000 years earlier than in the Languedoc), explain that from this time on the first metallurgists were able to make use of sometimes complex minerals which required a succession of complementary but mysterious treatments.


   

Prehistoric Man mined in four different sectors in the area : Vallarade, Font de Nuque, Pioch Farrus and La Roussignole. More than twenty mineworks from this period have been discovered.

Stone implements (mallets) were used to extract carbonated minerals (azurite, malachite) as well as sulphides (tetraedrite, 'grey' copper). Splinters of quartz, which broke away during the hammering, served as an additional tool for chipping at the mineral-rich rock.

   

The archaeological excavations at Roque Fenestre have helped in the understanding of the process for converting the mineral into metal. After extraction, and an initial sorting, the minerals were taken to the impervious shale rocks nearby, where depressions were hollowed out and filled with water. The minerals extracted were crushed, washed and meticulously sorted.

The 'grey' copper had to be scorched by burning branches of heather, to remove the sulphides which rendered the metal brittle, before putting it in ovens for smelting. The crude metal produced was then crushed up, washed and sorted in order to separate out the residues from the pellets of metal. A final stage, not identified in the excavations at Roque Fenestre, improved the quality of the copper and objects were also manufactured from the metal.

   

From the beginning of the Third Millenium, in the Languedoc and subsequently throughout France, copper articles became increasingly common amongst the variety of useful tools available to Neolithic Man. Daggers, axes, needles and beads are the objects most frequently found. Only later did metal totally replace flint and bone for making tools.

Articles formed from the metal mined at Cabrières, characterised by its impurities (antimony without lead), have been identified throughout the south of France.

Copper continued to be mined at Cabrières through the Bronze and Iron Ages, but probably with less intensity. Traces of tools made of iron, a few objects (lamps and fragments of jars) and inscriptions show that the mines were an important source of metal during the period of the Roman occupation of France. In the Middle Ages, and in the 19th Century, further mining was undertaken, and as recently as 1975 tests were made to determine the viability of mining the mineral barite.