ABSTRACT
Technological knowledge involves the tools and techniques for extracting the ore and for separating the metals or minerals from their rock matrix. Mining rushes typically begin with pre-existing mining technologies introduced by the first miners to arrive at the new discovery. The beginning of the modern world brought with it a mining technology that had become more or less standardized in Europe by the sixteenth century and that was exported worldwide with European global colonization. Early modernworld miners built simple pumping, hoisting, transport, and grinding machines from the gear trains, cams, pistons, cylinders, and other devices in common use at the time. German miners, for example, developed a system of wheeled carts and tracks for moving ore through the mineshafts, larger and deeper underground shafts, and hydraulically powered pumping systems (Grandemange 1990). The standardized European mining tool kit included basic knowledge of the process of mercury amalgamation for recovering gold and silver from ores. This technology later evolved into the arrastra and patio yard amalgamation processes in the Spanish colonial silver mines in Mexico and the Andes, the Freiberg barrel amalgamation process in the
Saxony region of Germany, and pan amalgamation on the Comstock. The landscapes of the earliest global mining rushes in the modern world clearly reflect the “adaptive radiation” of European mining technology that took place in the sixteenth century.
