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The native copper mines at Roua have yielded fire-setting workings and stone tools, evidence of ancient copper miningdating back to Prehistory. Located on a cliff, these works were partially damaged by black-powder workings conducted until the 19thcentury. An archaeological study conducted in the 1990s and 2000s already unscored the site’s importance for prehistoric copper mining southern Alps. However, a comprehensive analysis was still needed to reconstruct the extent of the ancient works, date them and assess copper production in prehistoric times.Two field campaigns (2019–2020) enabled systematic surveys to be carried out, revealing new galleries and identifying collapsedareas that were inaccessible due to the topography. The combination of several dating methods (radiocarbon, OSL, archaeomagnetism)applied to different sections of the cliff shows that native copper veins were mined as early as prehistoric times across all mininggroups. Ancient copper production, estimated on the basis of dated galleries, reached several tonnes of copper during Prehistory.Production at the Roua mines took place during the same period as that at Libiola and Monte Loreto in Italy (mid-4th–early 3rd millennium BCE), contributing to the spread of metallurgy from the Balkans. However, the specific nature of native copper mineralisation raises the question of how reduction techniques were acquired in the southern Alps, which have so far only been attested in Saint-Véran from the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. In any case, the native copper from Roua may have been used to manufacture small objects, such as those found in various contexts from the Late Neolithic period, particularly within Alpine and Chasséen cultures, possibly as early as the first half of the 4th millennium BCE.
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