Ore Mountain Mining Region recognised as a UNESCO world heritage site - for which it has been nominated - it should help to preserve it for future generations as a "developing cultural landscape". From the first discovery of silver ore in 1168 in Christiansdorf in the territory of the present-day borough of Freiberg, which is part of the Freiberg Mining Field, mining was carried out uninterruptedly in the Ore Mountains until 1990. Amongst the raw materials mined over the course of centuries were ores of the metals silver, tin, zinc, cobalt, nickel, copper and lead; but anthracite and uranium were also extracted into the
Period 3 element is referenced in the Bible as brimstone in English, with this name still used in several nonscientific terms. Sulfur was considered important enough to receive its own alchemical symbol. It was needed to make the best quality of black gunpowder, and the bright yellow powder was hypothesized by alchemists to contain some of the properties of gold, which they sought to synthesize from it. In 1777, Antoine Lavoisier helped convince the scientific community that sulfur was a basic element, rather than a compound. Elemental sulfur was once extracted from salt domes where it sometimes occurs in nearly pure form, but