'Thinking of the Descendants': Time and Temporality in Early Modern Mining

Tourists and historians visiting the Alps, the Ore Mountains, or the Carpathians can still hear echoes of past mining booms of the 12th, 15th and 16th centuries: adventurers and merchants flocked to inhospitable regions, destroying forests and becoming rich – and poor again – overnight. But in midst of this turmoil, striking forms of long-term thinking emerged: mining officials and city governments measured and mapped shafts and tunnels; managed refineries and forests; kept accurate records; and created long time series of silver yields. Building on Thomas Morel's recent analysis of spatial techniques in Central European mining, this lecture examines mathematically informed techniques by which miners, officials, and investors created temporalities: certain ways in which the past, present, and future relate to each other through accumulated experiences and horizons of expectation. We will look at bureaucratic genres of writing such as account books and yield forecasts, which were infused with providential and historical thinking. We also analyse attempts to harness astrology for making mining more predictable, based on the widespread theory of celestial influence on underground processes of metallogenesis. How did these number- and text-based techniques, from accounting to astrology, shape the practical handling of time? And how does the temporality of early modern mining relate to modern sustainability—a forward-looking principle of resource management that has been on everyone's lips since the 1987 Brundtland Report by the World Commission on Environment and Development?