Jeweller - August Issue 2018

ange with most of the miners and traders offering one gram and larger sizes.
There are potentially numerous rough sapphires under one-gram sizes being left
behind in the gravels sorted by the artisanal miners.
When the miners hit ground water in the pits, they would bring it up by bucket
for a very rudimentary use of water during the sorting process, which in either
case was done right at the top of the pit by the small group working that pit. We
did not see communal sorting or washing efforts.
The mining efforts were very labour intensive. We saw approximately as many
women miners as men and the women were often performing the same heavy
labour tasks such as digging with picks and shovels. The mining was always a
team effort at each pit with some members digging while others went through
the gravel for sapphires. The teams were almost always less than 10 people and
appeared to often be family and extended family groups.
The pits themselves were often very shallow although the depths varied
depending on their location. The pits that were at the bottom of the Granite
Gorge were the shallowest as the weathered granite bedrock was reached after
just digging to between half a metre and one and a half metres. Many of these
shallow pits were being mined.
Others were abandoned after the bedrock had been reached and the potential
gem-bearing gravel processed. As the mining moved away from the valley
centre, up the hill flanks, the depth of the pits would often increase as bedrock
was not reached until six metres in some cases. These were the deepest pits we
ROUGH ETHIOPIAN SAPPHIRES. IMAGE COURTESY WIM VERTRIEST/GIA
saw. They are often approaching agricultural land or in some cases agricultural
land is dug up to search for sapphires.
The deeper pits often had a problem of hitting ground water and filling up
partially or completely overnight. Even some of the shallow pits had this
problem if they were right at the riverbed. The miners would then have to
remove the ground water first thing in the morning before mining could
continue. They usually accomplished this by hand held buckets with a miner
standing in the water and shopping it up, then handing the bucket to a miner at
the top of the pit who would toss it aside. If the pits were on the deeper range,
there would be two miners in the pit to hand it up to the miner on the top of