About eight kilometres northeast of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski in central Poland, Krzemionki preserves a landscape built around mining. The striped flint found here has alternating grey bands that resemble a natural pattern of lines; prehistoric communities valued it for making polished axes and other tools. Mining began around 3900 BCE and continued into the early Bronze Age, ending about 1600 BCE. The remains are not limited to a museum case: the reserve preserves shafts, spoil heaps, workshops and the surface forms left by underground work.
The World Heritage property is larger than the visitor reserve commonly called Krzemionki. UNESCO lists four component parts: the main Krzemionki Opatowskie mining field, the smaller fields of Borownia and Korycizna, and the Gawroniec settlement at Ćmielów, where semi-finished axes were finished and polished. Together they show a connected system of extraction and production rather than a single mine. The UNESCO inscription in 2019 recognized the prehistoric striped-flint mining region as a serial property.
