FRANKFURT, GERMANY—New radiocarbon dates suggest that people were mining in Austria’s Central Alps in the middle Bronze Age, and again in the early Middle Ages. This is “a small sensation, since the academic world had so far not considered that Bronze Age mining in the Montafon mining area could be possible,” Rüdiger Krause of Goethe University said in a press release. Evidence for Bronze-Age mining had been found in the Eastern Alps, in the Mitterberg mining area, however. “What significance our new site in Montafon had in the context of Bronze Age copper supply in the Alps will be seen when we examine it further,” Krause explained. To read about a Bronze Age discovery in Russia, go to "Wolf Rites of Winter."