Featured Ancient silver mine

Beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I'm not a prince and I must be happy with more modest items

 

Me too . The things I didn’t know I needed!

Really? I had no idea!

Yes please! Definitely would love to see more

 

Augsburg or Hanau.
https://silbersuite.de/augsburger-silbermarken-beschauzeichen-und-meistermarken.html

 

@Marco Tizzoni - Hello & welcome to the forum!!

Like others have said please do post away. We all like to see pretty objects of all kinds.

Besides you never know when you will run up on some obscure piece that you would have never given a second look but because someone on the forum posted photos of a similar object you end up buying a treasure.

 

Many thanks for those follow-up posts and pictures, Marco. You've definitely got an appreciative audience here.

Going back to your miners: is that real silver ore in their cart?

 

Good morning every one, thank you for your comments.
I have not yet looked at the "ore" in the mine, i must wash it before. By its shape it could well be galene (lead sulphide) which was an important silver source because it contains small amounts of the desired metal. Galene was first reduced into lead, this argentiferous lead was then treated with a process called cuppellation in order to separate silver from lead.
In the beautiful item posted by Speechless there is some galene in the composition bottom right hand corner, it's that greysh stuff.

 

Here you can see an excellent way to get very dirty and to destroy your cameras. It was taken in an argentiferous galene mine in limestone in the Alps. It was radiocarbon dated to the 13th cent. A.D. You can see how it was dug. The smooth and blackened surfaces of the rock show it was dug by fire setting, the whithish marks on the black surfaces are chisel marks. The bottom of the mine is covered and filled by debris. This because these mines were dug by inverse steps, which means digging forward and at the same time upward leaving the sterile rock falling at your feet. Since taking the sterile rock outside is just a waste of time and money the ancient miners used to fill in the abandoned parts of a mine as much as they could with sterile rock. This fueled in the 19th cent, the legend of the dwarfs. Moreover when the ancient miners met a sterile area they tunnelled across it with the smallest possible gallery, just enough to crawl along it. But when you have no explosives there is no other way to dig a mine and enrich yourselves.

 

Here you can see another image of the same mine with the small left over pillars of rock used to to support it. Theey tried to avoid the use of wooden beams eams as much as they could.

 

And finally the detail of the rock surface with its tiny chisel marks and the small gray galene nodules

 

Galene - known here in the States (at least) as galena.

 

Yes, sorry about my spelling

 

A Meissen porcelain model:

 

I has a great-great (etc.) uncle who spent his life as a miner. Never met him personally, he was an old man when my father was a boy. My father said that this uncle had spent so much time in the mines with his hand wrapped around the handle of a shovel that he was unable to open his fingers.

 

è uguale, you simply took the French term.

 

I've a little Blue John miner somewhere, but tthe house has eaten the ruddy thing.

This is fascinating.

(I'm a Tolkien nut, dwarves rock.)