The study focuses on the reconstruction of the technological process in the 16th–17th century lead smelter in Sławków based on chemical and petrographic analyzes of slags. There are three main types of material at the landfill: glassy, crystalline, and weathered. Glassy slags are made of amorphous phase in which crystals of pyroxene, willemite, olivine, wüstite, and lead oxide appear. Crystalline slags are composed of wollastonite, rankinite, melilite, anorthite, quartz, and Fe oxides. Weathered slags have a composition similar to glassy slags, but they also contain secondary phases: anglesite and cerussite. Chemical analyzes confirmed that the smelter used sulphide ores, which were roasted, and the main addition to the charge was quartz sand. The smelting process took place in a brick-built furnace, under reducing conditions, with varied oxygen fugacity ranging from WM to MH buffer. The slag characteristics show a knowledge of the workers in the field of smelting methods. The addition of SiO2 allowed for the binding of elements that could contaminate the obtained lead, and at the same time, the low melting point of the material (1150 °C) and the melt viscosity (logη = 1.34 for 1150 °C) was maintained, enabling the effective separation of liquid lead.

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Ex otic clasts pres ent in flysch de pos its of the West ern Outer Carpathians en able in ves ti ga tion and re con struc tion of the eroded crys tal line base ment of the Silesian Ridge. The flysch rocks of the Istebna For ma tion (Jasnowice Mem ber: Paleocene) in the Silesian Nappe con tain mag matic and meta mor phic clasts de rived from the Silesian Ridge base ment. The crys tal line rock frag ments ac quired from co he sive debrites were an a lyzed petro graphi cally and geochemically, and zir con and rutile crys tals were sub ject to LA-ICP-MS U-Pb dat ing. Granitoid clasts yielded Meso-Variscan U-Pb zir con ages (325.7 and 330.6 Ma), with older (Neoproterozoic to Paleoproterozoic) in her ited cores and eNd 330 = -12.0 (TDM age of 1.98 Ga). The orthogneiss clast yielded a protolith age of 1635 Ma and fin ger print of ther mal re work ing at ~288 Ma. Zir con crys tals from the de tri tal clasts yielded sim i lar U-Pb zir con ages to the granitoid clasts (311.5 to 391 and 331 Ma). The rutile crys tals from sand stone yielded con cordia age of 344.7 Ma. Zir con crys tals from paragneiss, in ter preted as a granitoid en ve lope, yielded 238 U/ 206 Pb ages be tween 557 and 686 Ma and in clude an in her ited core of age ~1207.4 ±33.8 Ma. Age data from ex otic clasts and the de tri tal zir con and rutile frac tion sug gest the core part of the Silesian Ridge was a Neoproterozoic to Mesoproterozoic en ve lope in truded by Meso-Variscan granitoid plutons.