Technological Models in Andalusian Lead Mining during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the subsector of the mining of the Andalusian lead during the Nineteenth Century, one of the most important of the Spanish mining of the era, two different technological models lived together. On the one hand, in the framework of the “small mining penibética", an elemental technology that was using still with extent traditional energies, with a scarce mechanization and with un abundant labor employment; and, additionally, in the mines of Linares, in Sierra Morena, a greater technological modernization and a most intense utilization of the capital than coexists, nevertheless, with the systems survival of ‟laboreo” traditional unti1 beginning of the Twentieth Century. The difficulties that delayed the full incorporation of the outstanding technological paradigms in the European mining of the Nineteenth Century to the Andalusian basins are being studying, as well as the social and economic conditions that promoted specific adjustments of the same