The Minescapes "traveling seminar," "Mining for Color: Socio-Natural Sites of Mineral Extraction and Color Making," in summer 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 “traveling seminar” includes 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.

This event is organized as part of the Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle Working Group