Oldest Mines

Mining is the extraction of resources from the ground. In a way, just collecting something from the ground is not mining; mining includes some work, e.g., digging, to get access to something. Obviously, the resource was either material needed for tools, jewelry, daily life, or art. So the earliest mining efforts included flint, gold and gems, salt and coal, and ochre. Originally, only resources which were used unprocessed were mined, especially only metalls in native form. The use of any material required the knowledge how to process it, the different eras were named Bronze Age, Iron Age, and so forth, because the knowledge resulted in items which were created with that technology and were found by the archaeologists in their excavations.

This little list is a list of show mines you can visit where mining started before the Iron Age. It does not include the hundreds of sites which are not open to the public, or the sites which are unknown and only identified by the products which were made with the material mined there. We ended the list at the end of the Bronze Age because the Iron Age is equivalent to the Romans, and they had an abundance of mines all over Europe, and this list would become quite long. So the following mines were operated during the Stone Age, for the production of flint, pigments for painting, or salt for living. Later copper and tin were mined.

Name	Location	Type	Year	Explanation
Ngwenya Mine	Eswatini	Iron Mine	43000 BP	the ancient mine is an archaeological site, named Lion Cavern, a small cavern located on the western side of the northern open cast
Feuersteinbergwerk von Abensberg-Arnhofen	Germany	Stone Age Flint Mine	7300 BP	in the course of 700 years 300 tonnes of high-quality flint material were mined
Salzbergwerk Hallstatt	Austria	Salt Mine	7000 BP	an object made of deer antlers was found 1838 in the so-called Kaiser-Josef-Stollen, which was presumably used to mine salt, it was recently dated to be 7000 years old
Les minières de silex néolithique de Spiennes	Belgium	Stone Age Flint Mine	6350 BP	According to the UNESCO WHL this is the oldest mine in Europe.
De prehistorische vuursteenmijnen van Rijckholt - St. Geertruid	The Netherlands	Stone Age Flint Mine	6200-4650 BP	Neolithic flint mine assigned to the Michelsberg culture and the Stein group.
Mines Prehistòriques de Gavà	Spain	Stone Age Flint Mine	6000 BP	According to their publications this is the oldest mine in Europe.
Prahistoryczne Kopalnie Krzemienia w Krzemionkach	Poland	Stone Age Flint Mine	5400 BP	from around 5400 to 3600 BP, more than 4,000 shafts were driven into the earth near Krzemionki.
Çankırı Tuz Mağarası	Turkey	Salt Mine	5000 BP	Salt first mined by the Hittites, and the mines were almost continually operated, at least at a low level.
Grimes Graves	Great Britain	Stone Age Flint Mine	4600 BP	flint was extracted in hundreds of pits between 4600 and 4300 BP
Clearwell Caves	Great Britain	Iron Mine	4,500 BP	the oldest tools found in the mine were dated 4,500 BP, it is estimated that mining for ochre began around 5000 BP
Schaubergwerk Sunnpau	Austria	Copper Mine	4000 BP	fire setting created one of the largest mines of that time
Great Orme Mines	Great Britain	Copper Mine	4000 to 2600 BP	the largest Bronze Age copper mine in the world, produced about 1,700 t of copper
Schaubergwerk Arthurstollen	Austria	Copper Mine	3700 BP	early copper mining during the Bronze Age
Ecton Mine Educational Centre	Great Britain	Copper Mine	3600 BP	mining started with copper mining during the Bronze Age, during the Middle Ages lead was mined for some time, but later the copper was more profitable and during the heydays of the mine in the 18th century mostly copper was mined.