Searching the archives and stories of old quarries: lecture for the exhibition MY QUARRY
7On Tuesday, January 14, we cordially invite you to the accompanying lecture by Mgr. Natalie Belisová to the exhibition MY LOMY, which you can visit at the CPTO until February. The lecture with the subtitle “Issues of archival research in mineral extraction research” will present archival sources and working with them, possible pitfalls of research work and examples of quarries with a description of the history of mining.
Mgr. Natalie Belisová, researcher and one of the researchers of the project “Database of old quarries and quarrying sites in the territory of NP České Švýcarsko and CHKO Labské sandstones”, which resulted in the exhibition MY QUARRY. She has worked at the Institute of Monuments in Ústí nad Labem, at the Regional Museum in Děčín, at the Administration of the Czech Switzerland National Park and now at the Ústí Museum. She has been collecting information, taking care of small monuments of the region and searching for lost stories and connections for a long time. She is the author or co-author of a number of publications on cultural and historical topics.
In her lecture, Natalie Belisová will engagingly introduce to the audience the search in the archives as a systematic detective work, in which the whole picture is composed of individual disparate pieces of information. What archival sources and written sources can be used, what can be found in them about the history of the quarries (dates, owners, tenants and miners, equipment of the quarries, the amount of quarried stone and its specific use, accidents or various unexpected curiosities), including the possible pitfalls of this research work.
The lecture accompanies the exhibition MY QUARIES, which can be visited at the Centre for Natural and Technical Sciences (CPTO) at 3632/15 Pasteurova Street in Ústí nad Labem until 19 February 2025, from Monday to Saturday between 8:00 am and 6:00 pm.
MY LOMY, an exhibition of the Regional Museum in Ústí nad Labem, traces the history and remains of the quarrying of building stone in the landscape of the Elbe Sandstone. It presents the results of the research of more than three thousand quarries discovered and mapped by historians and geologists from the Regional Museum of Ústí nad Labem and the Centre for Documentation and Digitization of Cultural Heritage of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Applied Sciences in the framework of the research project “Database of old quarries and quarrying sites in the territory of the Bohemian Switzerland National Park and the Elbe Sandstone Protected Landscape Area”. The project TL05000407 was implemented in the years 2021 to 2023 and co-financed with the state support of the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under the ÉTA Programme.
The researchers surveyed an area of 323 km2, which extends from Petrovice to Mikulášovice. It reveals thousands of abandoned, now overgrown quarries for building or decorative stone, iron pits, traces of limestone prospecting or rare ores. The exhibition reveals the remnants of intensive exploitation of the landscape of the Elbe Sandstones in the relatively recent past and shows how our ancestors influenced the rock relief by quarrying, as well as what surprising things have been preserved to this day as a result of their activities.
Accompanying lectures by Mgr. Belisová is the second in a series of three accompanying lectures to the exhibition. The final topic will be presented on 12 February 2025 by Kamil Podroužek, PhD, PhD from the Faculty of Arts, UJEP. His lecture will focus on the provenance of building stone.
You are cordially invited.