If there was an ancient civilization that would make weapons and jewelry from copper, how exactly would they get it? Would they just dig it up and melt it down? Would they have to mine for it? If it is found in some kind of ore, how exactly would they separate it from the ore?Metal is one of the many things I've never been able to understand. If anybody could explain it in a kind of step-by-step thing, that would really help me a lot!
1. The ancient people took shovels and dug out a small side of a mountain. 2. Ancient pickaxes were used to harvest the booty. 3. Large fat men were hired and tortured to melt the copper down to a liquid endangering their personal health. 4. Last but not least they poured it into molds and added other materials to make jewelry.
ancient copper production was usually done from Azurite and Malachite - two minerals easily spotted because or their bright blue and green color. So most of it was just surface harvesting although planned mining leads back to 10.000BC in the archeological records. Later they found other minerals they could extract copper from - today it is mostly Chalcopyrite, Chalcocite and Covellite. The early melting technique as far as it is known was mixing the ore with silicate and limestone and reheating the resulting copper mate while discarding the slag to remove the remaining sulfur - you can get up to 97% pure copper from that process you only need a place you can heat up to temperatures above 1200 °C
Yes, you just extract it from the earth as it occurs in pure form just as does gold.
