Since 2024, the Project has co-hosted three Minescapes summer seminars organized by Tina Asmussen (Professor at Ruhr University, Bochum) and Pamela Smith (Making and Knowing Project Director) exploring the relationships between humans, materials, and the environment in mining landscapes across central Europe. Thousands of years of mining and mineral extraction has transformed European landscapes, politics, economies, and artistic and technical practices. These mining landscapes therefore serve as natural laboratories for investigating human-environmental relationships and their impacts from the past to the present.
The traveling seminars integrate experiential learning as participants move through the landscape to explore the archives of nature (mines, forests, and water systems) and society (archival libraries, museums, and art collections). The 2024 PhD Summer School, MINESCAPES: Socio-natural Landscapes of Extraction and Knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, was held in the millennia-old landscape of the Harz Mountains in Germany. While the 2025 session, Socio-Natural Sites of Extraction and Knowledge: Mining for Color in the Erzgebirge and the Early Modern World, focused on silver mining and its byproducts—blue mineral pigments—in the Ore Mountains, which span Germany and Czechia. The 2027 seminar, Minescapes: The Material Complex of Copper in Central Europe and Beyond, will be held in the former Upper Hungarian mines in present-day Slovakia.
The 2024 seminar was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2025, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, generously funded graduate student costs. From 2027, the Minescapes project is supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.