When people in tsarist Russia broke into the old workings at Kargaly, in the Orenburg steppe, nobody knew who had dug them. There were kilometres of tunnels. Vertical shafts dropped into the rock, horizontal drifts ran off from them, and the steps were still there, cut into the stone. Nobody could picture the builders, so the place got a name: the Horde mines.
They were much older than any horde. Ivan Semyan, an archaeologist and chief researcher at the Laboratory of Experimental Archaeology in Armenia, and a project researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi, dates them to the Bronze Age. They were copper mines, and the people who worked them lived in a settlement called Gorny.
Here is where it touches your bookshelf. The bearded fellow with a pickaxe, a forge and a taste for roast meat, the one who turns up in every fantasy novel, may have started as one of these men. Semyan's bet is about what a medieval or ancient passer-by would have thought on finding such a hole in the ground, with broken pots and tools still lying in it. Who digs underground, eats down there, and hauls things out? Gnomes.
The real people were stranger than the story. Semyan pictures a society with a ladder built into it. Children, being smaller, probably carried the ore out of the shafts. As they grew they moved up into the workshops, where the ore was enriched and the charge for the furnace was prepared. After that came the masters who smelted, and the masters who cast ingots and finished goods. Nobody lived underground, he is careful to say, but they spent a great deal of their lives there.
And they were not poor. Metal made them influential, and a good many of them grew no food at all. Herds were driven to the mine and swapped for metal. They ate a lot of meat. At Gorny the diggers dug a pit just for the bones.
Two studies by other researchers fit that picture. A 2022 paper in Археология Евразийских степей by Ekaterina Antipina found that cattle were the main food and raw material at Gorny, with 150 hornless cows for every horned one. A 2026 paper in Environmental Archaeology by Polina Ankusheva looked at the Vorovskaya Yama copper mine in the southern Trans-Urals. Its bones came mostly from cattle, sheep and goats about two to two and a half years old, with no embryos and no newborns. Grown animals had been brought to the mine to be slaughtered and eaten.
Semyan puts the whole case in one dry question: "чем не гномы?" Wealthy fellows with plenty of weapons and metal, working underground and eating meat. His own point is that at this stage the thread runs through others:
Many cultural scholars think these ancient miners are the prototype of the dwarfs that later turn up in European myths, and then in fantasy literature. многие культурологи считают, что это прообразы, древние горняки, это прообраз дворфов, которые у нас потом есть в европейских мифов, а потом и фэнтези-литературе
— Ivan Semyan, Osnova, 78:13
Semyan does not claim to have traced every step from miner to Middle-earth. The myths, he says, were formed later, by people who had only the holes in the ground to go on.
Still, the detail he leans on is easy to picture. A fantasy tavern with gnawed bones on the floor has a real ancestor: a pit at Gorny, filled with cattle that someone drove up to the mine and traded for metal.
