Mining Calendar 2013 – Vein Images in Saxon Mining

English translation of Jens Kugler’s original German introduction, including the historical quotation. References to the present day reflect the 2013 edition.

“Nevertheless, there appears to be all the greater need for … numerous illustrations of vein relationships, since, on the one hand, their locations in the depths of the mines are accessible to very few geologists and, on the other, the opportunity to observe interesting and instructive vein relationships is often extremely fleeting. Advancing mining usually removes them again very quickly, and they are then lost to science for ever.” Thus wrote Freiberg mining official C. G. A. von Weissenbach in 1836 in his work “Abbildungen merkwürdiger Gangverhältnisse aus dem sächsischen Erzgebirge”.

Today, impressive vein exposures are only rarely found in the extensive old mines of the Erzgebirge. Over the decades, the minerals have lost their freshly mined appearance and the ore its lustre. A few early illustrations of deposits date from the sixteenth century. Detailed drawings, followed later by photographs, have existed since the nineteenth century. From the seventeenth century onwards, various natural-history and mineral-deposit collections preserved specimens representing common raw materials, including massive ores. They still give an impression of the indescribable lustre of a freshly exposed ore vein. Vein sections sometimes as large as a table and weighing a hundredweight or more provide views that are no longer possible in the old mines. For when miners found ore, they extracted it.

The mineral resources shown here do not yet have the characteristic appearance of the finished products: the brilliant shine of silver, the dark weight of pig iron or the intensity of cobalt blue. Nor do they have the appeal of freely formed mineral crystals. The vein specimens show the natural raw materials embedded in their host rock. Yet to the knowledgeable observer they reveal the long history of their geological formation. Their appearance was familiar to the miners of the past.