Ancient Mines of the South Urals

Abstract

The article presents the intermediate results of a historical research, the purpose of which is to determine the distribution areal of ancient mining operations (Chud mines) in the South Urals. Travel journals of the academic expeditions participants of 1768-1774 P.S. Pallas, I. Lepekhin, N.P. Rychkov and I.P. Falk were taken as published written sources. The unpublished written sources include mainly archival documents from the period of mountain freedom in Russia in 1739-1782, stored in the archives of Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. It was established that the copper mines of the 18^th century were subdivided into “summer pits” and “winter mines”. The extraction of copper ore in the winter was common, which allows extrapolating it to the earlier periods of mining in the South Urals. A distinctive feature of ancient underground mining operations is the vaulted character of adits, while similar mines of the 18^th century are characterized by rock tunneling “under the support”. The “summer pits” of both without archeological exploration and archival documents do not have distinctive features. It was also established that the geography of the location of ancient mountain mines is not limited to the area of occurrence of cuprous sandstones of the Cisural area. Following the study, developed by Grigory Spassky, ancient mining developments in the form of exploration pits and mines are in abundance in the Southern Trans-Urals. They stretch along the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains in a narrow strip from the Krasnokhta River to the left bank of the Ural River and go to the Mugodzhar region.

Keywords:

Chud mines, copper mines of the 18th century, Kazan, Orenburg mining authorities, mountain allotments, copper smelters of the South Urals in the 18th century