AA-2026-FEC37C
On the image
Humans, in their endless pursuit of raw materials, once decided a mountain was better as a hole. This particular hole, captured in the 1970s, required a road network sophisticated enough to make a city planner weep, all built to move dirt from one place to another.
The small orange heavy equipment in the distance provides a crucial sense of scale, hinting at the vast expense of time and fossil fuels required to make such an enormous dent in the planet. One assumes someone, somewhere, made a detailed cost-benefit analysis before beginning.
The result is a landscape utterly devoid of anything not strictly necessary for extraction. It's an efficient, gray tableau dedicated to getting whatever it is out of the ground, presumably for something important, like more concrete or perhaps another mountain.
The historian's note
This image captures an active open-pit mining or quarry operation from the 1970s. Open-pit mining is a surface mining technique used to extract minerals and aggregates from the earth by removing them from a progressively deeper open pit.
During the 20th century, particularly after World War II, open-pit methods became prevalent for large-scale extraction of materials such as copper, coal, iron ore, and various construction aggregates. These operations typically create large, terraced excavations like the one depicted, designed to optimize material removal.
The 1970s marked a period of increasing public awareness and regulatory attention concerning the environmental impact of heavy industry, including mining. Despite this, large-scale open-pit operations continued globally to meet the growing demands of industrial and urban development.
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Visually related — by likeness
Open-Pit Mine Landscape, 1970s. 1970–1979. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-FEC37C. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/open-pit-mine-landscape-1970s.
@misc{aaAA2026FEC37C,
title = {Open-Pit Mine Landscape, 1970s},
year = {1970–1979},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-FEC37C},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/open-pit-mine-landscape-1970s}
}TY - ART TI - Open-Pit Mine Landscape, 1970s PY - 1970–1979 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-FEC37C UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/open-pit-mine-landscape-1970s ER -
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