Minescapes

Anna Graber (University of Minnesota), Making Mineralogy Russian: Bashkirs, Mining Administrators, and Earth Knowledges of the Urals, 1700-1819

As administrators of the Russian state mining system sought to regularize and expand metallurgical production in the Urals in the 1720s, they were obliged to rely on the labor and skill of a diverse population of miners and metal workers who, while lacking a scientific approach to minerals, nevertheless brought to the industry their own earth knowledges. This paper, a chapter of my book manuscript-in-progress “Tsardom of Rock: Knowing the Earth in Russia’s Mining Empire," examines the local knowledge of Bashkir ore finders, the chief body of prospectors in the Southern Urals and the Orenburg Steppe, and mine administrators’ evaluation of this knowledge. Initially highly esteemed by mining administrators, Bashkir mining knowledge was cast aside as Bashkirs’ political power waned in successive failed rebellions in favor of universalized, academic mineralogy. Still, the local focus of Bashkir mineral knowledge—as well as the local and experimental nature of copper metallurgy—provoked mine administrators and mine owners to develop a sense of regional and national specificity in their adaptation of mining science coming from Germany and Sweden. This concept of a national Russian mineralogy in turn helped construct the Russian Empire as a geologically coherent whole, naturalizing borders and imperial rule in frontier areas that began encountering direct rule from St. Petersburg only in the eighteenth century. Mining elites’ answer to epistemic diversity was to develop some of the first nationalist rhetoric in Russian science and to discursively define Russia from the ground up. 

Presenter: Laith Shakir (New York University) 

Title: "Aeriel Photography, Oil, and Archaeology in the Interwar Middle East"

Abstract: In the period between the two world wars, the post-Ottoman Middle East witnessed a measurable increase in two forms of subterranean engagement: archeological excavation and petroleum exploration. Historians of each field science have tended to study them in isolation from one another. However, using the archives of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) and the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), I argue that the histories of these two field sciences are intimately linked. This paper examines how oil companies embraced aerial surveying—a novel technique refined during World War I and later adopted by archaeologists and geologists alike—across their operations in the Middle East. Using aerial photography, the APOC and IPC surveyed the region’s landscape to chart out routes for railways, roads, and pipelines and to identify potential sites for oil extraction. By focusing on the IPC’s support of two archaeological expeditions—the 1937 Wakefield Expedition to the Hadhramaut and Aurel Stein’s 1938-9 aerial surveys of the Roman limes in Iraq and Transjordan—I show how the field sciences of petroleum geology and archaeology were entangled with one another and with the British Empire’s political and economic designs for the region more broadly. Though seemingly counterintuitive, these entanglements also reveal how scientists took to the air to better understand the subterranean world decades before the widespread embrace of satellite imagery and other, more familiar, remote sensing techniques. 

New Approaches in Mining Studies

Timothy James LeCain (Montana): Do Coal and Oil Drive History? The New Materialism and the Question of Mineral Agency

In recent years, as the new materialism, more-than-human history, and other theoretical and methodological innovations have gained influence, scholars have begun to rethink the potential agency of minerals. Conventional anthropocentric histories have generally viewed minerals as largely passive objects that human beings extract, process, and use. More recent scholarship, however, has suggested that we must consider that minerals have certain material natures and potentials—what James Gibson termed “affordances”—that exercise significant influences over how humans feel, think, and act. This potentiality has become a matter of especial concern regarding the two most significant climate-warming minerals, coal and oil. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously, and controversially, asserted in 2009 that, “The mansions of modern freedom stand on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.” Other scholars have probed the nature of carbon itself—the element that gives coal and oil their energetic potential—suggesting that humans have been lured and trapped into close relationship with these minerals that they cannot easily escape. Others disagree, arguing that such readings are mistakenly deterministic and thus neglect the true anthropocentric causes of global warming, such as colonialism or capitalism. In this talk, I argue that these debates over mineral agency and determinism are really debates about whether human cognition and culture exist primarily in our brains, or whether they extend out into the world around us. I conclude that the second may be the more convincing stance, and if so, there is a strong case that coal and oil should stand alongside of humans as central drivers of history.

Collaborative Research on Mining I: Roundtable with Pamela Smith & Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert 

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert (McGill University): Historical research within the field of contemporary extractivist politics: observations from collaborations in Mexico, Panama, and Québec.  

This presentation focuses on the political dimensions of collaborative research in the history of mining, and extractivism more broadly. For people and territories facing the incursions of mining, hydroelectric, or logging projects, contemporary extractivism generates intense fields of political debate and action. What are the possible contributions of university-based historical research to these fields? Conversely, how can the collaborative mode reconfigure the agendas, methods, and creations of conventional research? Three projects undertaken with social movements and Indigenous communities in Mexico, Panama, and Québec offer some observations on the practice, challenges, and possibilities of this mode of research.

Dimitrios Mitsopoulos (Columbia University) & Jennifer Amaya (Columbia Climate School): Remains in the Minescape: Education about Lead in Lavrion, Greece

This collaborative project aims to increase public awareness of lead contamination in Lavrion, Greece, where the cumulative effects of 5000+ years of silver mining have been mapped by geo-chemists and are known in some detail, however public knowledge of the high levels of lead pollution has lagged behind. The project includes an environmental chemist, a historian, doctoral students in history and geochemistry and teachers of history and chemistry at a local secondary school. The teachers and grad students are preparing lesson plans about the local history which will be combined with soil testing for lead with a portable kit. The student testing, which will be carried out in Spring 2026, builds on previous projects in Peru and Germany.

Welcome to the Minescapes Working Group!  

Welcome and Introduction by Conveners

Presentations: 

• Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum) and Pamela H. Smith (Columbia University): Minescapes: Socio-natural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge

  This presentation introduces the MINESCAPES project, which investigates mining landscapes as socio-natural sites shaped by centuries of human-environment interaction. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between natural sciences and humanities, the project examines 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. 

• Deren Ertas and Jordan Howell: Brief explanation of the Call for Papers

Question & Answer