ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Minescapes 1: What is a “Minescape”?

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel introduces the MINESCAPES Project, which investigates mining landscapes as socio-natural sites shaped by millennia of human-environment interaction. Papers in this panel introduce the Minescapes concept and the Experiential Traveling Seminars that serve as research and pedagogical frameworks, and provide examples of how the Minescapes concept can be applied as an approach and an analytic to study human-nature relationships in diverse times and places. The papers in this panel provide examples from Europe and Southeast Asia of the ways that studying Minescapes can illuminate historical relationships between human body and environment, or among natural science, commerce, and geopolitics.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sebastian Felten, Universität Wien, Institut für Geschichte

Individual Presentations

• What is a Minescape? - Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University; Tina Asmussen, Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum Bochum

• ‘May God protect me on my way… and no cloud or bad weather poison me’: Religion, Bodies and the Minescape in Northern European Mines (c.1600-1700) - Amelia Hutchinson, German Mining Museum Bochum

• “The parts of the World known to contain Diamonds”: the Science and Politics of Minescapes in Early Modern Southeast Asia - Claire Conklin Sabel, University of Vienna

Session Organizers

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

• Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University