Ancient Mines of the South Urals

Abstract

The article presents the intermediate results of a historical research, whose purpose is to determine the distribution of ancient mining operations (Chud mines) in the South Urals. Travel journals of the participants of academic expeditions of 1768–1774 — P. S. Pallas, I. I. Lepekhin, N. P. Rychkov and I. P. Falk — were taken as published written sources. The unpublished written sources mainly include archival documents from the period of owning mineral rights in Russia in 1739–1782 stored in the archives of Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. It was established that the copper mines of the 18th century were seasonally subdivided into “summer pits” and “winter mines”. The extraction of copper ore in winter was common, which allows extrapolating it to 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 18th century are characterized by rock tunneling “under the support structures”. The “summer pits” of both periods without archeological exploration and archival documents do not have singular 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 by Grigory Spassky, the article states that 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 Krasnokhty and Shartymka rivers to the left bank of the Ural River and go to the Mugodzhar region.