The joys and pitfalls of working with archival sources were summarized by Mgr. Natalie Belisová
On Tuesday, 14 January, the CPTO hosted an accompanying lecture by Mgr. Natalia Belisová to the exhibition MY QUARIES with the subtitle “The issue of archival research in mineral exploration”.
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 pískovce”, which resulted in the exhibition MY QUARIES. 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 she presented archival sources and working with them, possible pitfalls of research work and examples of quarries with descriptions of the history of mining. She engagingly told the audience how the search in the archives is carried out, that it is mainly a systematic detective work, during which the whole picture is composed from 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, quarry equipment, the amount of stone removed and its specific use, accidents or various unexpected curiosities).
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.
The final lecture accompanying the exhibition will take place on 12 February 2025. Kamil Podroužek, PhD, PhD, from the Faculty of Arts, UJEP, will discuss the provenance of building stone.
MY LOMY, an exhibition of the Regional Museum in Ústí nad Labem, traces the history and remains of building stone quarrying 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 Economics, within the framework of the research project “Database of old quarries and quarrying sites in the territory of the Bohemian Switzerland National Park and the Labské Sandstones 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.