ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Minescapes 4: Minescapes over the Longue durée

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel explores minescapes across time. Its primary aim is to assess whether, and how, this interdisciplinary framework can offer new avenues for understanding change and continuity in mining regions that have not typically featured in long-term geological, scientific, or environmental narratives. The focus is Tuscany, a region in Italy between the Apennines and the Tyrrhenian Sea that has been shaped by mining activities since antiquity. Like other extractive sites, metal production in Tuscany became the stage for significant socio-natural transformations, particularly during periods of intensified activity in the late Middle Ages and the contemporary era. Each paper examines the distinctive features of these sites through different mining practices – such as alum extraction, silver mining, and marble quarrying – highlighting the varied socio-economic and ecological transformations of mining communities, which in certain periods positioned these regions as hubs of scientific investigation, expert mobility, and metal-trade networks. Taken together, the panel raises questions of periodization and mineral reuse, and examines how interdisciplinary approaches grounded in historical, archaeological, and anthropological research can illuminate the long history of resource extraction within a specific geological landscape.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Anthony T Quickel, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• Minescapes Across History: Renaissance Mining and Its Eighteenth-Century Legacy in Medici Tuscany - Gabriele Marcon, University of Vienna

Session Organizer

• Gabriele Marcon, University of Vienna