Mining Calendar 2006 – Underground Tablets in Saxon Mining

English translation of the original German introduction.

The 2006 Mining Calendar is devoted to the signs, symbols, inscriptions and tablets found relatively frequently and in a wide variety of forms in the old mines of the Erzgebirge. Miners or mining officials placed them in the workings to record important facts and pass on information. Matters that had to be documented underground for legal or technical reasons included survey results (mining-field boundaries, centres of mining fields and other reference points), the boundaries of drainage-adit districts, adit rights and changes to them, the monthly advance achieved by hewers working on piece rates, the advance of an adit or level achieved by a mine within a year, claims to ore veins discovered underground and the names of those veins. The signs, symbols, inscriptions and tablets used for these purposes were formerly generally called Stufen. More specifically, they can be distinguished as mining-boundary markers, inspection markers, adit-district tablets, markers defining sections of an adit, piecework marks, quarterly angle marks, annual advance marks, discovery tablets and vein tablets. All these types of marker were connected with the legal, technical and economic aspects of mine operation.

In addition to these markers, old mines contain inscriptions intended to commemorate important events and individuals. Construction tablets can recall the completion of a pumping installation, an important bypass adit or complex underground masonry. The breakthrough point of an adit driven from opposite ends was often marked by a breakthrough inscription or tablet, which may give the exact date of the breakthrough. Elaborately designed inscriptions and inserted tablets commemorate visits to mines by persons of high rank. Other events that left inscriptions in old mines included floods, accidents and the beginning or end of mining activity. Inscriptions and tablets of this type are called event tablets.

Markers and tablets were also installed to convey technical information without significance in mining law. At shaft stations, tablets gave the name of the shaft and the connected adit, together with the shaft depth. Vein tablets were supplemented with the distance to the next shaft and arrows showing the direction.

As early as the High and Late Middle Ages, markers in the form of small, simply designed symbols were cut into the rock. In the sixteenth century, the rapid increase in literacy brought dates, individual letters and abbreviations as well. After the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the expansion of the system of direct state control of mining, markers and inscriptions became increasingly extensive as a result of regulations and other instructions issued by the mining authorities. An unmistakable trend towards greater craftsmanship can be seen. Alongside markers and inscriptions cut into the bedrock, elaborately designed tablets appeared. Skilled craftspeople made them above ground from various materials (sandstone, gneiss, metal and wood), and they were installed underground at a prepared location. The increased need for representation and the desire to convey ever more detailed information occasionally led to very large tablets. With the reform of mining administration, the abolition of direct state control and the introduction of an inspection-based system from the middle of the nineteenth century, less effort was spent on markers and inscriptions. To save costs, painted wooden tablets, and more rarely carved ones, increasingly came into use.

Investigating signs, symbols, inscriptions and tablets through underground documentation and the study of historical sources is a fascinating field of mining-history research.