What did real medieval mines look like?

Dannyalcatraz said:
I don't remember where it is- heck, there may even be more than one. America is pretty blessed with mineral wealth (except oil). The only countries better situated with non-fuel mineral wealth are South Africa and Russia.

What are you talking about? The US is the third largest oil producer in the world, being beaten only by Saudi Arabia and Russia. It isn't cheap and high quality oil like we can buy from Saudi Arabia, but we have plenty of oil mineral wealth.

Editted to add: Even if you want to talk remaining oil reserves we're still in the top 20. I don't think we can claim we're oil shy.
 
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Tewligan,

You remember correctly, and the financing your referring too has a lot to do with the term "blood diamonds", and yes, the diamond trade would be a wealth of adventuring ideas.

D-A,

Yes, I am getting out of it as a business, I am going to exclusively exclusive jewelry design :) and just collecting for myself. I have other things I would rather be doing for myself, such as cutting all the rough I have bought over the years, plus here in AZ, being near Bisby, I have a fair amount of Malachite (chatoyant [sp?]) and azurite to cab, even crystal azurite. Plus gold, silver, and copper to prospect. Plus a lot of cool stuff coming up from Mexico, including some awesome mexican opal and deep blue and purple chalcedony.

I order my turquoise from India, though. Oh yeah, some awesome petrified wood with vibrant red, yellow, and blue colors in it. Plus some gorgeous Arizona picture stone. I also have a fair amount of peridot.

I also have one piece of blue, yes blue, garnet certified by the GIA. This, the fully natural 6.92 ct Imperial Topaz, and a few others will have high reserves at the auction. I also have a 7.74 ct blue-green to red Color change garnet, and a bunch of sapphire and spinel of blue, green, purple, color change, red, yellows, etc... I'm only selling my stuff that is below 2.0 ct though. I'll be keeping my bigger stuff for my personal collection.
 

The Retsof Saltmine right outside Geneseo, NY was the biggest saltmine in North America, and second biggest in the world until it collapsed it 1994.
 

What are you talking about? The US is the third largest oil producer in the world, being beaten only by Saudi Arabia and Russia. It isn't cheap and high quality oil like we can buy from Saudi Arabia, but we have plenty of oil mineral wealth.

About American oil- we are third in production, but our reserves are about 1/10th of Saudi Arabia's, and less than most countries in the Arab world (except Israel) and other OPEC nations. In other words, we may produce a lot, but we don't have as much to produce- we're going through what we have at a higher rate than similar producers.

Much of our current production is from wells that are declining in output. We know we can get more from those wells, but its going to require secondary and tertiary recovery methods to get to.

Add to that the fact that most of what American wells produce needs significantly more refinement than most of the other major producers and you introduce another factor that effectively reduces the utility, and thus value of our production.

http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html#producers
At the risk of being almost totally irrelevant, there was an author on NPR last week who was talking about the diamond industry. He said that diamonds aren't actually very rare, but DeBeers only "releases" so many diamonds from their vaults every year to keep the rarity and therefore the prices artificially high. He also talked about how diamonds, because of their size and value, have often been used to fund rebels in war-torn areas. I'm not super-clear on details, but that seems like it could be interesting to port over to a fantasy setting.

Yep- and that could work for almost any mineral wealth out there- real or fantastic. Harry Turtledove's "Darkness" series features dragons (used like WW2 fighters) that must be fed cinnabar and some other mineral (coal?) to enable them to produce flame. Thus, cinnabar and coal mines were important strategic resources for the flights of (barely) trained dragons and their riders.

As for some more background on diamonds:
About a decade ago, the Russians were trying to get low interest loans to buy food, but South Africa was most visible among several nations that opposed helping them out. In an incredibly subtle and crafty move, the Russian government invited Mike Wallace (as I recall) of 60 Minutes to do a special expose on Russian diamond wealth. The vault's commanding officer (it was under a military base) gave him a tour of one of their vaults. It looked like a large, well stocked library, with large cases with many shelves. But instead of books, on every shelf was a bunch of shoebox-shaped & sized boxes. He pulled one down to show Mike- it was filled with investment-grade 1 carat flawless brilliant diamonds...just like every other box on that case. Each case was a different grade, size, cut, etc. of diamond. As he explained, Russia had hundreds of such vaults.

There was then a conversation that went something like this:

"If we cannot get the loans we need to buy food" the officer said, "we will be forced to liquidate our diamond reserves."

"Won't that adversly affect the price of diamonds? Won't that drive their value down?"

"Da- there will be diminishing returns- the more we sell, the less we will get per carat- but we must feed our people..."

Within a month, South African resistance to loans for the Russians had evaporated, and the Russians were buying food.

At any rate, just because something is "rare" doesn't mean its worth your investment. To give you another perspective, if you had bought a 1 carat "investment-grade" diamond for $1000 in (I think) 1970, it would be worth about $17K today. Not bad, but not great. By way of contrast, that same $1K invested in Blue Chalcedony (a fairly common stone) back then would be worth more than $1M today...
 

Just an answer to the original question ;).

On the following site, you have a few pictures of the older parts of the Rammelsberg mine, where mining took place during a period of about 1000 years: Page 1

Here is an example of a gallery dated at around 1150, though with quite a few more modern trappings: Page 2

Sorry, but the comments are only in French and German.
 



Treebore said:
Those are some really cool pictures! I wonder what gave the blue colors? Cobalt? What did they mine there? Iron?

It was primarily a silver mine, but there were plenty of other minerals as well, as cildarith points out.
 


Wow! 92 minerals from one mine! Many of them interelated such as copper/malachite, but still, it never occured to me that such a varity could be found digging out one mine site. No wonder it was mined for so long.

That specimen picture is pretty cool looking too. They call it something else around here, maybe Azurite, and the mine that pictured specimen is from isn't far from my home.
 

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