Mining meaning: telling spatial histories of the Britannia Mine

Rhatigan, James J.

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2019.10.010

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The remains of mining activity and places ruined by extraction have become re-signified as industrial and cultural heritage sites in many places around the world (Orange 2008;Peyton 2017;Rhatigan 2020;Staniscia and Yuill 2017). Their designation and management as such-especially for touristic consumption-can affect the daily lives of those who live within and adjacent to them (Sinnett and Sardo 2020;Sonter et al 2018).…”

Section: Community and Heritage On Halkyn Mountainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lead Mining, Conservation and Heritage: Shaping a Mountain in Northeast Wales

Nuttall

2020

Humanities

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This article discusses the shaping of Halkyn Mountain, an upland common in the county of Flintshire in northeast Wales. Extractive industry has had a dramatic impact on the area, and it was one of Britain’s major lead mining regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This extractive history is essential for understanding its contemporary character and is a key element of community identity and local heritage production. The mountain is a multilayered landscape that has been made and transformed by geomorphological and human action, by subterranean water flow, digging, burrowing and extraction, by internal rupture and the upheaval and movement of earth and rock, and by grazing, burning, clearing and churning up the surface. It continues to be shaped by management and conservation, by the lifeworlds of plants and animals, and by perspectives on what constitutes a landscape. Drawing from current anthropological research in Flintshire on the making and shaping of place, the article explores how Halkyn Mountain exemplifies the contested nature—and the contradictions and provocations—of landscape and the difficulties inherent in using, living on, defining and managing a place that has been reshaped by industry, but one that is continually coming into being. It does so through a consideration of the area as a landscape shaped and given form by lead mining, by multispecies encounters, by land management and conservation initiatives, and by how notions of heritage inform local identity and regional preservation.

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Section: Community and Heritage On Halkyn Mountainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lead Mining, Conservation and Heritage: Shaping a Mountain in Northeast Wales

Nuttall

2020

Humanities

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“…Previous researchers have commented upon the associative grey zone between mine waste, heritage and perceived current and future economic uses. This includes scholarship that has pointed out that mine wastes can evoke associations of home and act as involuntary memorials to past generations (Goin and Raymond 2001), solidify community identity (Robertson 2006), facilitate complex and shifting politics over time (Rhatigan 2020) and merit active preservation of mine wastes due to their nature-cultural associations (Bartolini and DeSilvey 2020). Living among former industrial sites also fosters diverse and often ambiguous community memories and heterogeneous associations that cannot be reduced into a homogenised whole (Storm 2014;Wråkberg 2019).…”

Section: Introduction -The Heritage Of Mine Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

Ambiguous Matter

Venovcevs

2022

JCA

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This paper explores mine waste that originates from resource extraction by specifically focusing on waste rock, tailings, dust and material culture from the resource extraction industry. By drawing on examples from fieldwork, archives, local media commentary and limited interviews from two iron-mining regions in Arctic Norway and sub-Arctic Canada, this paper follows mine waste as it routinely transgresses attempts to be managed. Mine waste spills out of its prescribed sinks, it oscillates between being considered waste to heritage to potentially valuable commodity, and it blurs the boundaries between spaces dedicated for mining and for non-mining. In following these trends, the paper calls for attentiveness to the ambiguous materiality of mine waste and how heterogeneity and excess circumscribe attempts at easy characterisation and management of the ubiquitous wastes that come to dominate mining regions. As such, archaeological approaches to studying mine waste can illustrate how mine waste becomes the default, lived-with condition of life in regions dominated by ongoing mining operations.

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