History in Ice: 3,000 years of anthropogenic lead pollution

Heavy metal emissions from mining recorded in environmental archives including European peat bogs and Greenland ice cores reflect lead production, and by extension, silver production, in the past. Past efforts to document and interpret such archival records have been limited by sparse and discontinuous sampling, low temporal resolution, and large dating uncertainties. Here we present a nearly contiguous, sub-annually resolved, and precisely dated record of lead pollution in northern Greenland from 1240 BC to AD 2000. Comparisons to historical and archaeological evidence show that substantial lead pollution began ~400 BC and that major upturns correlate with known periods of European mining activity, and may indeed give more chronological precision to our understanding of Roman mining, and some major downturns appear coincident with severe plague epidemics, and also periods of warfare.