MELLANIUM: INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Granite Batholith under Cornwall

Could you imagine that MellaniuM virtual realistic environments would ever connect industrial cultural heritage and a massive intrusion of granite under the South-West tip of England?

Well MellaniuM will be participating in the VAST 2008 workshop “Serious Games and Cultural Heritage”. As an example of virtual engineering we have recently finalised the replica of a famous old steam locomotive 0-6-0 “Jinty” 47279 designed originally in the early 20th century and still running at the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.

MellaniuM's 0-6-0 Jinty

Keighley and Worth Valley Railway

We are hoping to stimulate some discussion on the potential of using the MellaniuM application for “Industrial Archaeology” in Cultural Heritage. It has been suggested to us personally by Prof. Bob Stone of Birmingham University that virtual replicas of the remarkable inventions as developed at the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain at the start of the 18th century would clearly enhance the cultural landscape. Technological marvels such as the first iron bridge or steam-driven beam pumping engines would lend themselves ideally to the importation of CAD models into the UNREAL platform.

First Ironbridge and Beam Engine Pump

Strangely enough, however, it has been argued that the British Isles was also at the core of the technological revolution of the Bronze Age over 3500 years ago. It has been posited that the rich tin mines of Cornwall, in the far-west corner of England, was the invaluable prize for which the Trojan War was fought. Bronze, an alloy of tin and copper was the most important commodity of its time and there is evidence of a tremendous battle between Celtic princes on the Gog Magog hills near Cambridge at a city called Troad around 1200 BC.

Many of the geographical features which surround the epic battle site on the Gog Magog hills can be matched to Homer’s “Iliad” written around 300 BC and historians have theorized that the Greeks simply wrote down for the first time what had been passed down orally in the Celtic epic stories.

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The mines in Cornwall were continually worked throughout the Bronze Age and the span of the Roman Empire and later until the mines extended under the ocean and simple animal and water power could not deal practically with flooding. Surprisingly enough though the invention of the first industrial commercial beam pumps driven by atmospheric steam engines allowed efficient removal of the flood water and the mines could be driven deeper underground. Even now plans are afoot to open flooded mines which penetrate thousands of feet under the Cornwall coast.

Cornish Tin Mine Ruins

The overall historically significant reconstruction of the tin mines of Cornwall could indeed involve delving into the depths of the Bronze Age over 3500 years ago and navigating a continuous history to the present day.

In fact the application of a virtual realistic reconstruction of the cultural heritage of “TIN, As a Cultural Metaphor”, as suggested by the first question of this monograph, could indeed even encompass the mineralogical formation of the tin deposits by hydrothermal solutions enriched by high pressure vapour leaching from a massive granite intrusion cooling over millions of years under the tip of South-West England.