Elena Maria Whitshaw
1 mysterious but real ancient mining digs and artifacts
Whitshaw spends her life in an arid part of Spain trying to put together and understand several pieces of an unknown pre-Roman ancient civilization. Among the pieces of her most interesting puzzle are an ancient but apparently still functioning (in 1928) aquaduct with no discoverable destination, a castle built of multiple layers each from a different era, unusual ancient mining processes in the rich nearby mining fields, a very puzzling rectangular pool cut in the bottom of the Rio Tinto river, several different and very curious water sources one with an unknown "temple" somewhere out under a desert floor, and the fascinating villagers and local natives of a time when this area was very remote and inaccessable. This is one of my all-time favorite books as it gives not only some very real and mysterious puzzles for the mind to gnaw on but a strong flavor for the time and place Elena writes from. She also suggests other aquaducts scattered along the Rio Tinto river and describes how the area guarded by the castle was the entrance to one of the ancient world's richest mineral fields worked by humans and perhaps, well, something else which is too small and peculiar to be human and digs vertical shafts into mineral deposits unlike any later miners. She also searches for the ways that the ancients got the wealth of this vast mineral field out into the wider world. Truly a book full of food for thought.
