5,400-Year-Old Gold Mine at Sakdrisi, in Georgia (South Caucasus): this is the world’s oldest known gold mine, with mining operations dating back to the Bronze Age; sadly, most of the site was destroyed by a Russian mining company in 2014 [3973×5230]

This gold mine dates back to about 3400-3000 BCE, which would make it the oldest gold mine ever discovered.

As [this article](https://archive.org/details/AntonioSagonaTheArchaeologyOfTheCaucasusFromEarliestSettlementsToTheIronAge2017C/Antonio%20Sagona%20-%20The%20Archaeology%20of%20the%20Caucasus_%20From%20Earliest%20Settlements%20to%20the%20Iron%20Age%20%282017%2C%20Cambridge%20University%20Press%29/page/n281/mode/1up?q=%22Mining+for+metal+and+ore%22) describes:

> Sakdrisi is a complex of four mines categorised into four areas and covering about 60 hectares. The complex comprised mining shafts between 3 and 5 meters wide, transitional corridors, and pits. One of the prehistoric workings reached a depth of 27 meters (88.5 feet).

> Secure radiocarbon samples clearly indicate that Kura-Araxes miners exploited the gold from the mid-fourth to mid-third millennium BC, making Sakdrisi the oldest known gold mine in the world. Later miners re-worked the old deposits in the fourth and fifth centuries, but were not as intrepid as their prehistoric forebears.

The same article goes on to describe how the gold was extracted:

> Mining at Sakdrisi involved a lot of hard work. In the first instance, the miners used fire to crack the extremely hard matrix in which the gold is embedded. Experiments demonstrated that the miners would have left the galleries after lighting a fire — small pieces of wood were probably laid against the wall – to avoid the noxious fumes and, when the air cleared, they pounded the walls of the mine with heavy, hafted hammer stones, leaving tell-tale hollows. Tools varied according to the task, from heavy mallets to finer implements, such as antler picks, used to extract deposits in narrow cracks. The next stage involved hand sorting and crushing the ore, which was finally milled to a powder.

> Estimates have suggested that the industrious miners exploited somewhere between 500 and 1000kg of gold at Sakdrisi in the course of its lifetime.

Most of the prehistoric mine at Sakdrisi was destroyed back in 2014, when the Georgian government decided to revoke the site’s protected status and then allowed a Russian gold mining company (RMG Gold) to begin mining the site.