Memories of the 28th Century

I don't often think about the Atlantis story, but it came to mind recently as a part of a story that I started writing. I needed something like that as a plot device. Well, to make a longish story brief, I didn't find Atlantis, but I am 99% certain that I have figured out where Tartessos is, and one theory is that Atlantis was based on Tartessos. But the location of Tartessos was uncertain until earlier today, when I found it.

I was looking for a good Bronze Age, or so, setting for a story that I am writing. One of the characters was going to make fake ancient metal things for resale, and Tartessian styles became the models. I was aware that there is a large region in the Iberian Peninsula that has very high grade metal ores, especially copper, tin, silver, and gold; that region is called the Iberian Pyrite Belt, and it is the reason why the Rio Tinto has been polluted pretty much for ever. The Rio Tinto itself, its gravel and bed, also has been mined for thousands of years for tin and other metals in its gravel.

Sierra Moreno is one place where the Pyrite Belt is above ground, and on the Northwesterly side of it there has been active mining since before 2000 BCE. The mine was only closed in the twentieth century; the copper mass was depleted by about 1890, but taking pyrites for sulfur continued after that. The name of this mine, and the associated town, is Tharsis, and they have been called that for a long time. The name is unusual for Spanish, and it certainly appears to be a shortened version of Tartessos. I just found out that gold is still being mined at Tharsis; a gold mine, Filon Sur, produces 1000 kg per year.

The Tharsis mine is about thirty miles North of Huelva, the provincial capital, and about twenty miles West of the Rio Tinto, where there also still is some mining; although Rio Tinto Mining now does its mining in other places around the world, but it started out by reopening ancient mines on the Rio Tinto.

While archeologists haven't said pinned down the location of Tartessos; it is well accepted that Huelva was the port of Tartessos. There have been enough archeological finds, including ship wrecks in the river, that there is no doubt, and there are two rivers that empty into the ocean there, the Rio Tinto to the East and the Rio Odiel to the West. Rio Odiel is rather small, but it probably would have been useful for hauling metal from Tartessos to the port. It appears that there has been a town adjacent to the ore body at Tharsis since very early times, but it appears that there is little or nothing remaining from thousands of years ago, because buildings were torn down and replaced when they had deteriorated. There are mentions of some pieces of mining equipment from Roman times having been found in abandoned pits, but it appears that all of the earliest sections of the mine were completely dug away when it was turned into an open pit mine during the Roman era. The same is true of the Rio Tinto mine, which is even bigger, but soil was moved from one section to another when it was expanded.

Within the last decade, or so, someone theorized that Atlantis ended up under the marshes of the Park National of Donana about thirty miles southeast of Huelva. As I recall it, the theory is that there was a rise in sea level that flooded the city, and Plato wrote that the city subsided beneath the ocean. Someone else guessed that Atlantis was somewhere else in that area. I'm not certain about Atlantis, but I think that it was dreamed up in Plato's mind based on data that could not be readily checked; it was 9000 years before Plato's time. In Plato’s time Tartessos was a place that was almost unreachable, and it was beyond the Pillars of Heracles, so Plato put his fictional city beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

I would love to go to that area and look around; it's the oldest industrial region on the planet. There was mining and smelting on a substantial scale before 2000 BCE, and it's the closest that I could ever get to Atlantis. There is a lot more to the Iberian Pyrite Belt, so maybe someone will decide to mine even deeper.

References:
MBendi's listing for Filon Sur, Gold Mine (1000 kg/year), located in Tharsis, Huelva, Spain
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharsis_%28Alosno%29

A blog about Tharsis
http://amigosdetharsis.blogspot.com/

Google view of Tharsis showing mining pits now filled with water.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/21...b7cd4b6b788f70

About archeology at the Rio Tinto mine
http://barryyeoman.com/2010/09/the-m...built-empires/

http://www.spainthenandnow.com/spani...efault_37.aspx
A site on Huelva including history, museums, etc.
http://www.andalucia.com/cities/huelva/history.htm

The websites of the archaeological museum seville and Huelva, If your Spanish is good, then they will be useful.
http://www.museosdeandalucia.es/cult...te/museos/MHU/
http://www.museosdeandalucia.es/cult...ect=S2_3_1.jsp