(Under)mining Preindustrial Europe: Ecology, Society and Cultural Change, 1180-1550 CE

Europe’s first mining boom began in the later twelfth century CE (~850 YBP), amid favorable climatic, political and demographic conditions. Despite its seemingly simple technologies and modest energy regimes, manual mining triggered a cascade of processes. These included altering ecologies and landscapes; stimulating migration; creating privileged occupational communities; prompting debates regarding the harms and benefits of ore extraction; and generating insights about humans’ place in nature more broadly. Nevertheless, the entangled biogeochemical, social and cultural legacies of manual mining remain largely obscure, certainly as compared with its economic, political and even scientific impacts. There are both conceptual and methodological reasons for this neglect. Yet, as this article argues, by combining approaches across history, archaeology and the paleo-sciences, it is possible to acquire a fresh perspective. Evidence from several European mining districts, drawing on written sources, physical remains and their examination at the micro-, landscape- and regional levels, attest communities’ complex experiences of and approaches to the outcomes of non-mechanised mining. Interdisciplinary historical accounts of the era’s extraction are thus uniquely poised, first, to recast a “pre-industrial” industry as having long-term and often adverse consequences; and, secondly, to recover earlier societies’ ambivalence towards mining. Finally, an interdisciplinary approach to earlier mining history responds to calls for recontextualising the Anthropocene from a chronological standpoint within Europe, augmenting its more common critiques from beyond that region and in the aftermath of industrialization.