Also, the historic mining areas of Mexico, Peru, Chile, Bolivia and others do show evidence of open pit mining. This was something seen in central Europe as well, this region being a major producer of, particularly, precious metals in the Middle Ages.
Craftmanship
As to the methods used by the Indians of South America to work the gold into the artefacts and jewellery which the Conquistadors accumulated, it appears that they were not so very different from those employed by the Egyptians and the Chinese centuries earlier. Whether there was any collaboration, as some observers have speculated, between the Chinese and the Indians on either side of the Pacific is unknown although it seems unlikely, if not impossible, due to the huge distances needed to travel and the lack of evidence.
Nonetheless some of the techniques the Indians used were not unique to them; in particular the lost-wax method where a craftsman carves his design onto a piece of wax, which is then covered by a layer of moist clay. The clay is then fired in a furnace. As the wax core melts and the clay layer with the design imprinted on it hardens, a hollow core emerges into which gold and copper are then poured. The clay is then removed from the furnace and the gold hardens and takes on the shape of the clay design. When it is finished the clay layer is removed to reveal the gold object. At this stage the copper is then removed by scouring and the gold artefact is then finished by the craftsman. Similar techniques were used to make silver objects.
Whilst the Indians’ artefacts were in many cases both beautiful and complex the Conquistadors were not much interested in the quality of the workmanship but rather in the quantity of the gold bound for Spain – they melted down the jewellery and artefacts, thereby losing priceless objects. This turning of art into dross, even gold dross, was echoed several centuries later when many valuable silver artefacts were sold by their owners as scrap for cash as the underlying metal price soared crazily in the early 1980s; the value destroyed by this exercise was huge.
10. Chile
During the 16th century, following the establishment of Santiago in 1541 – now capital of Chile and its largest city – gold mining was carried out in the south, with a number of rich but relatively small alluvial operations having been established by Spanish settlers. Output is thought to have been around 50,000 ozs annually but by the end of the century the indigenous Mapuche Indians had pushed the Spanish back towards the centre of the country and gold mining declined rapidly.
In the 18th century, after hostilities between the Spanish and the Mapuche had ended, gold mining began to revive, partly in response to the building of a royal mint in Santiago. New gold mines were established in the north of the country in the Atacama region. These were high-grade mines where the gold was found in vein deposits and annual output reached around 100,000 ozs by the beginning of the 19th century, from where, as we will discover later, production fell away as interest turned first to copper and then to nitrates.
11. The East
Whilst the onset of the Dark Ages, as the Roman Empire collapsed, plunged Europe into social and economic depression and chaos, it did not materially affect countries in the East, although historically there had been trade and economic contact between the two regions.
China
It is interesting how China always pops up in the forefront of developing technology, whatever the era. Its relative backwardness during most of the 20th century seems to be an aberration when viewed against the backdrop of recorded human history and the current revival in China’s economic power could be viewed as a reversion to the norm.
So it was that as our Middle Ages period started in the 11th century and Europe was showing signs of having left the Dark Ages behind, China was way ahead. Its development of the coal firing of blast furnaces in the 10th century led to an annual iron output of perhaps as much as 125,000 tonnes in the first three quarters of the next century (though some estimates put the figure even higher), a rate of output that Europe did not achieve for almost another 500 years when blast furnace technology was finally mastered by European ironworks. It was also an early example of green environmental action as it ended the wholesale destruction of forests needed for the manufacture of charcoal, which had been the old fuel of choice.
We have earlier seen the problems that stalked Europe’s recovering economies in the Middle Ages when supplies of silver became restricted leading to liquidity problems in trade settlements. This was a problem also in China around the end of the 10th century and it was at this time that the Chinese introduced paper money to try and address the liquidity issue. Up until that time China’s silver and gold production, and that of its Central Asian neighbours, had been sufficient to finance trade flows in the broad region. But as the Middle Ages loomed many of these silver and gold mines – suffering from old age – experienced a sharp fall in output.
12. Diamond Mines in India and Brazil
Later, in the next two parts of the book covering the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age, we will look closely at the rise of Africa to its position as the largest supplier of diamonds in the world. But prior to this the main sources of diamonds were firstly India and then Brazil. Before the expansion of diamond usage as a result of the coming of the industrial age and then the mass marketing of diamonds by De Beers, diamonds were the exclusive preserve of the fabulously rich.
India
Today diamond mining in India is very much a shadow of what it was, consisting now of one hard rock mine, the Panna mine in Madhya Pradesh in central India, which is controlled by state-owned National Mining Development Corp, and has a current capacity of 100,000 carats, small alluvial workings scattered around the country, and a new Rio Tinto project, the Bunder, also in Madhya Pradesh. However, going back many centuries to the time of the Phoenicians and the Romans there is evidence of trading in diamonds and many of them will have come from India, although there is a view that some African diamonds may have also been traded following incursions by the Phoenicians in the 5th century BC as they circumnavigated Africa.
Whatever the truth, the world both in ancient times and in the Middle Ages used diamonds for adornment – these came mainly from India and were highly prized, and therefore the property of the rich. The diamonds were largely found in alluvial settings clustered in a broad region with Madras as its southeast extension. Despite the alluvial nature of the host environment the diamonds quite possibly came originally from kimberlites formed in the Himalayas and over scores of millennia were lifted and then washed down to the central plains of India north of Madras, where they lodged in ancient river beds, and were then over many years covered by the movement of earth and silt.
Indian diamond deposits had been worked probably for four millennia at least and Roman writers like Pliny and Ptolemy who were interested in minerals had noted their existence, but it was around the 11th century that more frequent mention began to be made. Two of the most important producers of diamonds in the 16th century were the mines of Panna and the fabled mines of Golconda near Hyderabad, both in central India. Indian diamonds were usually found in alluvial settings, often laid down in terraces just a few feet below the surface. Mines were also established to the south near Madras (now Chennai) on the Pannar River and there were other diamond workings to the west in the Anantapar district.
All these mines had been worked for some centuries but more extensive exploitation took place in the 19th century when a number of large stones were uncovered. Such stones were very old and hard, and had been weathered by movement to a smooth and brilliant finish. One of the problems facing early Indian stones was that cutting techniques, which were crude, were as likely to damage, even destroy, the stones as to shape
