Pliny's "Ruina Montium" and the Roman gold mining in Asturias: critical observations on the alleged application to Las Medulas and to the Bessa mines. According to numerous publications, in particular by the French prof. Claude...
morePliny's "Ruina Montium" and the Roman gold mining in Asturias:
critical observations on the alleged application to Las Medulas and to the Bessa mines.
According to numerous publications, in particular by the French prof. Claude Domergue and the Spanish researcher Javier Sanchez-Palencia (Ramos), and their pupils, the high alluvial formation of the Tertiary age, which dominates Las Medulas village, would have been the object of gold mining in Roman times, and the procedure of “ruina montium” described by Pliny, consisting in an hidraulic technique, would have been used: so that, in 1997’s the territory has been declared a Unesco World Heritage Site.
In reality, from the careful reading of the Latin author and from the local giacimentology and the historical-mining emergencies, it appears that the procedure consisted in the dry demolition of primary deposits, with a procedure derived from the "cuniculos" technique used in the military field, and that it was applied for the exploitations of the primary gold deposits in the maritime Asturias, during the first century BC. It was not used for the high tertiary alluvial sediments of Las Medulas, as finally recognized by the first creator, as they contain only a few and hardly recoverable gold, and there are no trace, or evidences, of the supposed works. However, his outdated theories continue to be supported and spread, in particular by Spanish CSIC researchers, but it is clear that at the basis of the "continuity" there are the huge public economic resources put in place for supporting the defined and unanimously accepted World Heritage.
The alleged hydraulic abatement, channeling and washing of large portions of sediment, in order to recover the inconsistent presence of gold, has no basis or possibility to be a useful system of gold exploitation, in any time. On the other hand, there are historical testimonials and geomorphological evidence to prove that the fantastic landscape of Las Medulas is the result of natural events, facilitated by some tunnels that cross the tertiary high deposit. These tunnels represent ancient water pipes for different purposes, including the exploitation of real alluvial gold deposits, consisting of fluvio-glacial gold deposits that covered the low terraces of the Sil stream, as well as other streams south of the Cantabrian Mountains.
The reveries of the aforementioned CSIC researchers also translate into studies tending to demonstrate an impossible metallurgical use of mercury by the Romans, for recovery the fine gold of Las Medulas. And the authors do not explain how it is possible to discriminate between the alleged (and improbable) Roman mercury traces from those left by the certain and massive recent use.
With regard to the low terraces deposits, which were certainly exploited by the Romans in the 2nd century AD, French and Spanish scholars also affirm that they contained only gold in small and thin flakes, they ignore the precise testimonies of the presence and collection of grains and nuggets and, as a result, they provide ridiculous tenors and total production. Furthermore, they ignore the real historical exploitation techniques of these deposits, and give unreal interpretations.
Based on these knoledges, and with the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the researchers of the CSIC have undertaken studies on the gold deposit of Bessa (Piemont, Itay) to find the origin of the techniques used in Spain and to teach us the history of this mine and of the Piemont territory romanization. To do that, and with the hope of also obtaining local economic contributions, they relied on a local non professional, already publicly discredited for his archaeological reveries, and from him they acquired incomplete, distorted and interested information on the bibliography and on the historical and technical knowledge of the Bessa mine exploitation. For their part, they have not bothered to carry out independent bibliographic searches, so that, in addition to having false information on the Bessa, they ignore the existence of other similar mines, more or less close, exploited by the Salassi or by the Romans with different techniques. And they do not take it into account when, following the first publications, their boss and principal author, Sanchez-Palencia, was personally warned. In any case, their "researches" was then limited to topographical surveys and to a few useless drillings carried out in alleged Roman "water basins" used during exploitations: instead, these are modern structures built for agricultural-pastoral purposes, as was published time before.
