ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What is a Minescape?

• In Event: Minescapes 1: What is a “Minescape”?

English Abstract

Why use the term “Minescapes”? For the Minescapes Project, this term denotes both a physical site, a heuristic, and a methodology. In this collaboration between the German Mining Museum in Bochum and the Making and Knowing Project, which began in 2023, the Minescapes Project fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between the natural and social sciences and the humanities to study the "archives of nature and culture"—from soils, water, and vegetation to historical maps, manuscripts, and material objects. Integrating material landscape analysis, scientific methods, and archival research in a longue durée perspective, MINESCAPES illuminates how extractive practices have fundamentally reconfigured ecosystems and societies across millennia. By transcending established nature-culture dichotomies, this methodology yields historical insights critical for understanding contemporary debates on resource extraction, sustainability, and climate change.

Authors

• Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University

• Tina Asmussen, Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum Bochum