gold mines in production in South America today there is little evidence of ancient gold mines as one might find, for example, in Egypt or Spain. However, the importance of gold metalworking and the quality of the objects found suggests that gold was mined, perhaps extensively, by these ancient civilisations, and certainly centuries later the Conquistadors found more than enough gold objects to satisfy their lust for the metal. It is also the case that the Spaniards themselves did not find gold mines; the gold booty they took back to Europe from their conquests was simply the ancient artefacts that they acquired from the indigenous people.
So if the source of the gold used by South American goldsmiths did not come from open pit and underground mines where did it come from? The most likely answer is that the gold was alluvial and had been naturally scoured out of rich deposits high up in the Andes over millennia, and washed down to lower levels where perhaps large nuggets of pure gold caught the eye of local inhabitants. It is not a large jump to where ancient craftsmen, intrigued by the beauty of the gold, started to fashion items of jewellery and plate from a metal that they would have found easy to work due to its softness. It is also likely that the basic furnaces, which they would have used to make molten gold for the moulds of the objects they were to work on, have simply disappeared over time.
There is also a theory that the Incas, who were fine stonemasons, may have developed an extraordinarily advanced technology to cut stones to very high specifications. It is suggested that huge gold sheets that the conquistadors found were used to concentrate sunlight rays to create a source of solar energy powerful enough to cut stone. Unfortunately, though the Incas may well have developed this industrial-type technology they did not have the technology to record the process – i.e. paper and ink.
Chile
There is an old mining saying that the most likely place to find a mine is where one existed in the past. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that evidence was uncovered of mining around 500 BC at the giant Chuquicamata copper mine in northern Chile. Of particular interest were remains uncovered when the current mine was being explored and then developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A number of well-preserved hammers were found, as were the remains of a body of an ancient miner and a basket of copper ore.
Radiocarbon dating suggested that these finds were from around the 3rd century AD, or perhaps a little earlier than that. Unfortunately, although some ideas were formed as to where mining took place, at Chuquicamata no actual workings were uncovered, perhaps indicating that ancient mining was confined to surface shows of copper. Although Chile was later to become a sizeable gold producer in the 18th and early 19th centuries, there is evidence of some gold mining in ancient times, and a little more during the period of the Inca occupation of parts of northern Chile.
Peru
In 2004/05 a major ancient iron mine was excavated by archaeologists from Purdue University in the US, in an area of Peru a couple of hundred miles south of Lima, where centuries ago the Nasca civilisation lived between the 1st and 7th centuries AD. The old mine was in the form of a 700 cubic metre chamber close to a current ochre mine. The chamber would have been dug out using hand tools to break and then scour out the ore. It has been calculated that the ancient mine produced around 3,700 tonnes of haematite over 1,400 years of operation. This is of course a tiny amount by modern mining standards but the Nasca people were artistic and the haematite when crushed and treated would probably have been used for painting, not for producing metal on an industrial scale.
13. Africa
The techniques required to treat copper and iron were introduced into southern Africa as much as 2000 years ago, although exact dating is difficult as climatic conditions have eroded quite a lot of the evidence. Although the people of southern Africa did not formally document their social and commercial activities as was done increasingly in the Roman world from the early centuries AD onwards, plenty of evidence has been found of mining activity, particularly in what is now South Africa.
The main sites were uncovered as a result of geological work carried out ahead of the establishment of new mines – two major South African copper mines, Palabora and Messina in the northeast corner of the country, were built on old mine sites. Palabora is thought to have been originally worked around 800 AD when azurite and malachite were the targets, and a network of chambers with linking shafts and adits was uncovered and investigated before Rio Tinto developed a new copper mine in the early 1960s, a mine that continues to operate today. Messina on the Zimbabwe border is also thought to have been originally worked around the same time as Palabora, and in the southern African region other smaller workings in the form of open pits have also been uncovered, although the dating is often less certain than for Palabora.
Earlier copper workings were found near Agades in Niger where it has been estimated that there were mines in the 1st millennium BC and perhaps before. The Kansanshi area of Zambia, whose modern operations we cover later, was also a mining site around the same time as Palabora. With no written records it is difficult to advance investigations much further than observing the evidence of mining activity in sub-Saharan Africa derived from old workings, basic smelting sites and metal objects, and carbon dating techniques used to assess the age of the evidence.
Of particular interest is the identity of the Africans who were involved in this ancient mining. The curiosity comes from a colonial belief that sophisticated commercial activity would have been beyond the abilities of indigenous Africans so there must have been migration from the north, the Arab world in particular, perhaps in the form of technical advice from Arab traders or perhaps in the form of a long disappeared civilisation.
This line of speculation is similar to that relating to ancient mining activity in North America where, as we have already noted, Indian lore does not seem to include information on historic mining in the Lake Michigan area where ancient workings were found. The conclusion, however, must be that at some time technically advanced African tribes occupied areas of southern Africa and mined copper – it is important to remember that Africa has experienced significant tribal movement throughout history (although critics of the continent’s colonial period sometimes seem to suggest that the Europeans’ arrival disturbed political structures that had existed unchanged for millennia).
Other ancient southern African mining sites have been found in Botswana and Zimbabwe, where copper artefacts including jewellery and beads as well as iron tools have been carbon dated, with some estimated to be from the end of the 1st millennium AD. There is, too, evidence of ancient mining in the techniques for treating low grade iron ores, observed around the turn of the 19th century in West Africa, today a key destination for customers like the Chinese searching for long-term iron ore supplies. The Hausas of Northern Nigeria used galena as a cosmetic powder, which simplified the search for minerals in the region in the colonial period. The development of this traditional adornment is thought to go back many centuries.
There is also evidence of gold mining in the West African region as early as the 5th century, and mining carried out by indigenous miners using techniques not dissimilar from those used elsewhere including fire setting to crack gold bearing ore. The mines themselves were largely relatively shallow pits, alluvial operations and also small-scale underground operations, perhaps going down 30 feet.
14. The Structure of Ownership and Operation
Today the mining industry’s operating and ownership structure is largely settled. There are some government-owned mines but mining worldwide is dominated by private ownership where capital is provided by shareholders and banks, and a board of directors sits on top of an administrative and operating structure.
National and regional governments set tax and royalty rates and also provide a legal base for the industry’s operations through legislation. Governments may also make state land available
