This chamber, with the surface of the walls that evidence hammer stone tools, is large in comparison to the single small entry.  The photographer though not yet at the end of the shaft is past me evidencing the long bending construction.
At the end of the working day, more than 3000 years ago the Chalybe (from the Argonautica) miners set down the very stone tools, one of which I hold in my hand.  As I am typing this my thoughts have wondered back to an Archaeologist and Teacher who can, for his students, quote the name and author of a book critical of Diffusionism but for himself has a need to go out of his way to point out boastfully that he distains to read that book or any Diffusionist theory, let alone the culmination that is Stoahist theory: he like the academics at the time of Copernicus believes he and his cronies can not be so wrong.  Given the large amount of very early preliminary work that has been published on this subject (in some cases by top academics like one Harvard professor) what do you say to people like that?  What can you say?  I walked away though I was tempted to say, “Such an attitude and arrogance is a proof that a degree is not an inoculation against unkindness let alone stupidity.”
Many of the mines have small, as shown above, as well as large secondary chambers.
At the back of this shaft I am pointing out seams (veins) that in places hold inclusions of pure native copper.  The veins were created when hot molten material from within the earth was forced through cracks in the hard rock the prospector attending this site with me called “Keweenaw Volcanic’s.”  Under pressure the hot molten materials were forced into openings (vogues) in the volcanic rock that latter hardened giving the nodule shapes shown in subsequent pages on this site.  Had these shafts been present as volcanic openings or vogues they would have been filled with hot molten copper in the same process that formed the other copper nodules found at this site and visible in the picture behind the hammer.
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