Recovering Salt from the Sea

This scene, depicting the collection of salt from seawater, is one of many woodcut prints illustrating the hundreds of mining operations explained in De re metallica.  Written by Georgius Agricola, the publication was hailed as one of the most important technological texts of the 16th century, in part due to the detailed procedural drawings based on actual practice rather than theory.  Agricola invested 20 years of his life writing the book, and another three were needed for artists, such as Basillus Wefring, to complete the illustrations. Here, the sea flows from the upper left corner into trenches, marked "D." The saltwater is purified and dried in a series of basins, marked "E," and then collected with rakes and shovels, marked "F" and "G."