Ancient Roman Mining and Quarrying Techniques
Read this article about Roman mining to learn how ancient Romans solved its technical problems. They even had mechanical devices for removing modest amounts of water from mineshafts.
Mining Techniques
Deep-Vein Mining
Figure 4: Simple deep-vein diagram
Figure 5: Iron axe pick marks in a tuff mine
This technique involved using mainly iron tools to chip ore deposits underground, and lift them out with a basket. Workers used this technique to mine a majority of their minerals including copper, lead, silver and tuff. To begin, vertical shafts were dug at equally spaced distances in order to speed up the process by having numerous dig sites. To avoid the need to bring ladders, miners dug handholds into the shaft walls. These were used both for climbing in and out and for raising baskets of ore. Once at the desired depth, miners began digging horizontal tunnels called galleries towards one another. Adits were also used occasionally to prospect a dig before investing the manpower to mine, and for drainage which is discussed later. In the case of tuff tunnels, only iron axes were needed. This worked well because of the stone's soft material characteristics. Usually, stone hammers and wedges were used first on harder rock. Lifting stones out of the mines required a large amount of effort and sometimes were the cause for a mine to be abandoned if not for drainage; both are discussed later on.