How it began
Sakdrisi lies in Kvemo Kartli in southern Georgia. Research by Georgian and German archaeologists indicates that gold production there began around 3400 to 3300 BCE, during the oldest phases of the Kura-Araxes culture. The culture is ancient and predates the modern state, but the mine is on Georgian territory. Andreas Hauptmann and Sabine Klein wrote in the journal ArcheoSciences that excavations proved the Sakdrisi gold mine to be the oldest in the world.
Before it existed
The region south of the Great Caucasus is known from the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece, which stands for recovering gold from river placers using the skin of a sheep or an ox. Sakdrisi showed something different from washing river gold. At the turn of the fourth and third millennia BCE, people in the South Caucasus were already mining gold ore underground and processing it locally.
How it works
The miners followed gold-bearing ore underground. More than 15 tunnels and mining platforms were found at the site, along with stone tools. The extracted ore was given a first treatment at the mine, and a nearby settlement of miners was identified where the ore went through secondary treatment and smelting. Chemical study of gold objects from the region found gold alloyed with variable amounts of silver and no sign of sophisticated treatment of the metal.
What lasted
Thomas Stöllner estimates an output of about 1 kilogram a year over 600 to 700 years, or roughly 500 kilograms in total. Although gold was mined from the oldest Kura-Araxes phases, it rarely ended up in graves at first. Later gold objects became more complex and took on a role in the burials of regional elites. In 2009 the Georgian National Museum signed a long-term cooperation memorandum with the German Mining Museum and Ruhr University Bochum to continue the research.
