Mil C. Domergue, PALLAS, 50, 1999, pp. 89-100.

Etruscan tin: a legend?

The history of the discovery

In 1 876 the Bullettino di Paletnologia Italiana published the news that the mining engineer F. Blanchard had discovered a cassiterite deposit in an ancient mining area in Tuscany1 .

This discovery had been made in the low hills (proudly called mountains) that raise from the swampy plain of Maremma along the Tyrrhenian coast in the province of Leghorn (Livorno), close to the village of Campiglia Marittima (fig. 1).

Three years later, in 1879, a short paper by P. Strobel about this tin mine appeared in the same magazine2. In this article he reported mainly F. Blanchard's opinions, expressed by him in another magazine, with a brief comment. He made some observations about the ancient "Etruscan" mines where the cassiterite had been found, supporting the evidence put forward by Blanchard to prove the antiquity of the mine. The ancients worked only the upper part of the deposit where tin ore could be found mixed with iron ore and not its deeper parts, where there was not tin ore. The ancient mine where the tin ore was first found was called "Cento Camerelle" (One hundred small chambers) because it was a honeycomb of small galleries, the site lies on the so them slopes of Monte Valerio (264 m above sea level), which is the southern part of Monte Fumacchio (so called because of the water steam which once rose from the cracks in its rocks and that could be seen in the cold wintery days). Later on Blanchard found tin ore also in other nearby mines, Cavina and Monte Rombolo (388 m above sea level). He observed that there was another site, Campo aile Bûche (Field of the Pits), on the southeastern edges of Monte Rombolo, where there must have been cassiterite, because it was not possible that the ancients dug iron ore in such narrow and deep holes since there were other iron deposits where the ore could be dug more easily3.