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the highest adit-entrances should have been covered by ice. It is true that with the withdrawal of glaciers in our time some relics of mines (-of minor importance and in extremely high position-) appear every now and then, but those mines had been exploited and abandoned long before the glaciers covered them in the last decades of the 16th century. As to the question of religion there seems to prevail a mix-up of cause and consequence. When the production decreased mine-workers had to be set „free", and in a catholic archbishopric as Salzburg it was, from the viewpoint of those times, only natural that non-catholic workers were given notice and had to go (Ludwig 1981). Finally, noble metals from America, which were mainly traded into the Levante area and Asia Minor (Davies, 1939), could only have deterioriated productivity and worsened the economical situation if their import caused an inflation of gold- and silver-prices. This was definitely not the case in Salzburg, where prices of noble metals remained basically stable in the crucial centuries or even went up very slightly. Particularly in the case of silver the Salzburg mint needed more of it than was supplied by the mines. Consequently, silver, which was hard to get at, had to be purchased from countries outside the archbishopric. Thus the demand was higher than the supply, certainly a situation, that does not foster the development of inflation.
The simple reason for the dramatic decline was the exploitation of the ore-deposits without on a large scale providing money for new explorative adits .
In addition to that, approximately a hundred years of intense mining activities within a comparatively limited area meant increasing technical problems (longer adits, deeper shafts, more water) and at the same time less ore with poorer contents of gold and silver. So multiple negative developments paved the way into mounting difficulties (Gruber, 1991).
Please look at survey 6 „pauperation of ore" (= dia 6 )
In the year 1616 the private mining entrepreneurs gave up and the state in the specific form of the Archbishopric of Salzburg took over, an early form of nationalization, so to speak. The introduction of gunpowder-blasting in the mines, in the year 1641, guaranteed a certain rise of production, but the average results hardly ever exceeded 10 % of the best years at the time of the private entrepreneurs in the middle of the 16th century.
In the year 1741 the state founded a new industrial complex at Böckstein (Gruber, 1979; Reissacher, 1863) ore-dressing facilties, houses for the workers and their families and an administration unit, all planned right from the beginning in functional order and built in the following years (Wehdorn, 1977). In our time two buildings within this complex have been turned into mining museums. In one of these an ore-stamp, an ore-dressing machine and an amalgamation-mill have been reconstructed after the technical construction- plans of Joseph Rusegger (Rusegger 1841, Schroll 1812), director of the Gastein mines in the middle of the 19th century. All machines are in perfect working order, of course with electrical current as a power-agent instead of water that was originally used.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the Austrian state as mining-entrepreneur gave up. The following private companies, the „First Gewerkschaft Radhausberg", the „Second Gewerkschaft Radhausberg" under Dr. Karl Imhof (Imhof 1911, Canaval 1911 and 1924), and finally the German
„PreußAG" (Mutschlechner, 1968; Florentin, 1953). None of these were really successful in our time. One of the PreußAG adits, opening up inside the Radhausberg a zone of hot, humid air with high contents of the inert gas radon, is taken advantage of as a theraphy-station, where patients with rheumatism, arthrosis or asthma recover their health (Scheminsky, 1955). This „Heilstollen" („thermal rock gallery") together with the museums in Altböckstein are late witnesses of a once grand, flourishing mining-centre for silver and gold, with regard to the latter even holding the top position among Alpine mining-areas around the middle of the 16th century.
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