Abstract Europe’s first mining boom began in the twelfth century amid favorable climatic, political, and demographic conditions. Despite its seemingly simple technologies and modest energy regimes, manual mining triggered a cascade of processes, altering ecologies and landscapes; stimulating migration; creating privileged occupational communities; prompting debates on the costs and benefits of ore extraction; and generating insights about humans’ place in nature more broadly. Yet the entangled biogeochemical, social, and cultural legacies of manual mining remain largely obscure for both conceptual and methodological reasons. Combining approaches from history, archaeology, and the paleosciences offers a fresh perspective. Evidence from several European mining districts—written sources, physical remains, and analyses at the micro-, landscape- and regional levels—attest communities’ complex experiences of and approaches to the outcomes of non-mechanized mining. Interdisciplinary historical accounts recast a “preindustrial” industry as having long-term and often adverse consequences and recover earlier societies’ ambivalence toward mining. An interdisciplinary approach to earlier mining history responds to calls for recontextualizing the Anthropocene from a chronological standpoint within Europe, augmenting its more common critiques from beyond that region and in the aftermath of industrialization.
G. Geltner (Thu,) studied this question.