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The Minescapes Seminar in summer 2025 (May 19-25, 2025) focuses on mining areas in the German and Czech border regions of the Ore Mountains. Besides silver, copper, and lead ore, these mines also supplied mineral pigments for millennia, including cobalt (now also a component of lithium battery production). Recent research has shown that cobalt from these European mines was used in the blue-and-white porcelain industry in East Asia during the preindustrial period, and participants will study the long term local and global production and exchange of these pigments. Like all minescapes, pigment mining left behind toxic remains. At the same time, acid mine drainage, a significant source of pollution from abandoned mines, has itself recently become an experimental source of color production.
The Minescapes 2025 Workshop will be an onsite scholarly “traveling seminar” with field trips into mines and mining landscapes, presentations by experts on different aspects of the minescapes and color production chains, with the aim of understanding pigment mining and making, its global routes of exchange, and new uses for these ores.