Электронная библиотека

The collocation “Zakamskoye silver” is mentioned in the Russian historical records and silver items were regularly found in the Urals and Siberia. The common view of many historians and archaeologists is that it was about this term refers to silverware made in the East. At the same time, searches for precious metal ores in the Urals and adjacent territories have been going on for centuries since the first mention of the mountains in the Russian chronicles. The author demonstrates that there is silver in the Urals in great quantities in polymetals, and the earliest known mining of silver and copper in Russia began in 1492 on the Pechora River. Accordingly, the term “Zakamskoye silver” refers to another silver-copper deposit located in the northern Urals. Whether it was exploited in the Antiquity and Middle Ages has been the subject of contention, but by the beginning of the Russian colonization, it had been already exhausted and abandoned. During the industrial development of the region in the eighteenth century, silver contained in copper ore was recognized as unprofitable for extraction. However, the presence of silver in copper ore was proved. In the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, silver in the Urals began to be mined in significant quantities from polymetals due to technological progress. In archaeological and historical research, this fact allows us to look differently at the presence of silver in copper items and copper in silver items, indicating that these items are made from local raw materials. The study covers the period from about the 12th to the early twentieth centuries.

Ural, History of mining, Protoindustrial archaeology, Silver mining, “Zakamskoye silver”