Akjoujt

Akjoujt lies in the arid country of western Mauritania, where wells and copper deposits stand amid the desert. At nearby Guelb Moghrein, ancient miners dug into a deposit of malachite in the workings known as the Grotte aux Chauves-Souris, or Cave of the Bats. Radiocarbon dates place the extraction and smelting of this copper by the early fifth century BCE. The site is among the traces of an early metalworking tradition in the western Sahara, long before the caravans of the later desert trade.