Lavrion

How old is mining at Lavrion?

The review’s dates. Voudouris and co-authors (Minerals 11, 76, 2021), citing Ross and others, give direct evidence of mining from the third millennium BC. Pb isotopes and litharge suggest it began in the fourth millennium BC. Mining continued at least intermittently until about 100 BC, with minor activity into the Late Roman period. It culminated in the Classical period, sixth to fourth century BC, at Kamariza. The review dates the discovery of the higher-grade “third contact” ore around Kamariza to 483 BC. It describes more than 1,000 ancient shafts. It also says Lavrion is the only ancient lead-silver district known where vertical shafts reaching 100 m connect underground galleries.

Modern mining. The review’s introduction says the area was not worked again until 1859, when Andreas Kordellas and Giovanni Battista Serpieri started operations, and that modern mining ran until 1977. A later section dates the resmelting of ancient slag heaps from 1864 and gives the French company’s span as 1875–1981. We quote both rather than choose. The Handbook serpierite sheet, outside this site’s set, says Serpieri helped to reopen the ancient mines at Laurium.

Output. At least 2.3 million tons of lead and 7,800 tons of silver were extracted, from ore grading up to 20 wt% Pb and up to 400 g/t Ag. Worked ratio: 3.39 kg of silver per tonne of lead. This page makes no claims about Athenian history beyond what the review states. The other localities are on the localities index.

Which minerals the Handbook places at Lavrion

The count is 14 of 176. Method: a script reads the Distribution field (from Distribution: to the next Name:) of each of the 176 sheets in this site’s reference set as pdftotext -layout text, strips diacritics, expands ligatures, joins line breaks and matches case-insensitively. The pattern accepts Laurium, Laurion, Lavrion and Lavrio, so the diacritic in Lávrion cannot hide a match. Every match in fact reads Laurium. The 14 are adamite, arsenolite, atacamite, aurichalcite, austinite, beudantite, botallackite, cyanotrichite, diaboleite, mendipite, olivenite, paratacamite, phosgenite and smithsonite. Austinite also cites a crystal-structure paper on material from Kamareza, Laurion in its references; that does not change the count.

Mine or slag. Seven of the 14 name Laurium for slag: atacamite, botallackite, diaboleite, mendipite, paratacamite and phosgenite outright, and beudantite for both pure masses in the Kamariza mine and the slags. Five name a mine: Kamariza (adamite, austinite, beudantite, olivenite) or Plaka (arsenolite). Smithsonite, aurichalcite and cyanotrichite give no setting. For copper chlorides, a slag label and a mine label are different provenance, so it is worth recording which; see what is a pseudomorph for the related labelling problem.

Six slag-first species, outside the set. The review names fiedlerite, thorikosite, georgiadesite, nealite, paralaurionite and penfieldite as first discovered in the ancient slags. The Handbook sheets fetched for laurionite, paralaurionite, fiedlerite, penfieldite and georgiadesite all name Laurium slag. They are comparators and are not in the 176. Laurionite appears in the review’s type-locality table (Kamariza), while its Handbook sheet calls it an alteration product of slag; we report both. The species index has the species pages.

638 minerals and 23 type localities: checking the review

What the review says. Lavrion has 638 primary and supergene minerals, and 23 were first found there. Its Table 1 credits a mindat.org page and related articles, and prints 22 rows: agardite-(Nd), attikaite, drobecite, glaucocerinite, hilarionite, kamarizaite, kapellasite, katerinopoulosite, katsarosite, ktenasite, laurionite, lazaridisite, mereiterite, natroglaucocerinite, nickeltsumcorite, niedermayrite, prachařite, serpierite, stergiouite, voudourisite, zincaluminite and zincolivenite. We could not fetch the mindat page, so the 23rd name is not supplied here.

Checked against the IMA list. A script matched each of the 22 names, and the six slag-first names, to its row on the September 2026 IMA list. All 28 rows give Greece as the country. Natroglaucocerinite and zincaluminite are status Q, questionable. Serpierite (1881), laurionite (1887), penfieldite (1892), paralaurionite (1899), georgiadesite (1907) and glaucocerinite (1932) are among the grandfathered names. The list’s Country column is a country, not a mine, so the mine-level attributions above are the review’s. On the review’s own figures, 23 of 638 is 3.6%. See what is a type locality.

Smithsonite and adamite from Lavrion: the copper-bearing ones

From the review. In the oxidation zone, which reaches up to 270 m thick, sphalerite altered to smithsonite, hydrozincite and hemimorphite. Galena went to cerussite and anglesite, and chalcopyrite to secondary copper minerals. The review’s Figure 6 shows Cu-bearing adamite, as pseudo-octahedral crystals and Cu-bearing smithsonite, both from the Hilarion mine, Kamariza.

From the sheets. The adamite sheet records bright green (cuprian) among its colours, and may fluoresce and phosphoresce lemon-yellow under SW and LW UV. The smithsonite sheet lists green, apple-green, emerald-green and blue among its colours. Neither sheet ties a colour to Laurium. The UV pages are is adamite UV reactive and is smithsonite UV reactive.

On a label. Write Lavrion (Laurium), Attica, Greece, then the mine (Hilarion, Kamariza, Jean Baptiste, Plaka) and whether it came from slag. Arsenolite is on the list above, and its sheet calls it a very toxic substance. This page gives no handling advice; see toxic minerals in a collection, HSE EH40, COSHH 2002 or a clinician. We say nothing about collecting access. Nothing here is offered for sale; the wanted list is the only commercial route.

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