The MINESCAPES Summer School, which ran 1-9 June in the Harz ‘minescape’, has concluded with a great sense of satisfaction and inspiration for further cutting-edge research in mining and environmental history. The summer school included 13 PhD students working with researchers from around the world, scholars working on the history of science and technology, the history of mining ecology, the social and health histories of mining communities, and other areas.
The MINESCAPES Summer School, also titled “Socio-cultural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge in the Middles Ages and the Early Modern Period”, brought together researchers and students from the humanities and the natural sciences to collaborate across disciplines and to better understand human-environment assemblages, complexes, interactions, understandings, and legacies in the historic mining area of the Harz. The Rammelsberg Mine, the focus of the Summer School, has been mined for silver and copper since the 10th century CE.
There is much to be discovered and understood about “historicity of materials, processes, and bodily experience in specific environments—questions that are central not only to the history of science but to human-environmental relationships more broadly“. Mining, which included intense and back-breaking work both above and below the ground, pulling out precious metals from the Earth, is a perfect case study to better understand preindustrial approaches to the environment.
For 9 days, students and researchers straddled the disciplines of the humanities and the natural sciences. They visited the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, to study maps and rare books; tested water and soil; and visited underground shafts. Truly a combination of documentary, physical, and embodied learning. We hope that this is a starting point for a wealth of research on a multimethodological social, cultural, and environment history of mining and metallurgy.
The Summer School was generously funded by Volkswagen Stiftung, and culminates over a year of planning. Special thanks to Tina Asmussen, of the German Mining Museum in Bochum, and Pamela H. Smith, of Columbia University, for their organisation and for making this happen.
