Two Article Tuesday: Medieval Mines and Modern Pipelines

I had the time to read two article this weekend that produced a pretty intriguing juxtaposition that I’d like to share.

First, I read Paweł Cembrzyński’s “Towards an ecology of medieval mining towns: linking social and environmental changes” in Archaeological Dialogues (2026), 1-18. This article does what it says on the box: it interprets the Medieval mining town of Kutná Hora in Czechia through the lens of socio-ecological systems.

In doing so, Cembrzyński argues that a mining town manifests a densely interrelated network of ecological process. Some of them are natural: the presence of minerals near the surface, the availability of fuel for smelting, and accessibility of the topography to the town. Some were “social” including the location of an existing monastery, the tradition of royal mine ownership and the existence of capital to extract the resources. The roles of technology, population, and historical contingency “intertwined with the environment via flows of matter.”  The key agent in this particular ecological reading was the existence of a feedback loop where the deposits of silver stimulate population growth, which, in turn, increases the need for capital, which — for the authors at least — stimulates technological innovation. This loop, however, did not operate outside of the myriad contingencies of history including the various wars that wracked Central Europe in the 15th century. 

The paper’s conclusions are relatively modest arguing that by understanding the major components of the system, it becomes possible to scale this analysis on a regional or even supraregional level and to use it for the basis of computational modeling. This, in turn, can inform the production of new hypotheses and research questions that can reinvigorate the study regions and sites. In general, I’m not a huge fan of this kind of modeling for producing answers — especially to the complex issues related to the birth of capitalism in Medieval Europe — but I do find that they have the potential to shape the kinds of questions that we ask. There’s a risk, to my mind, of tautology or worse, naturalizing these ecological systems and the networks of relations that they produce. This is historically (and politically) fraught with such matters as the birth of capitalism.

The other article that I read was Ryan Rybka’s “Tensions, Engagements, and Activisms along the Pipeline Route: Tracing Resistance to Line 93 in Northern Minnesota” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology 29 (2025). Far from the ecological assumptions and modeling postulated in Cembrzyński’s article, this article understands pipelines as hyperobjects (sensu Morton 2013). These are objects whose extent, impact, and interrelationships are so expansive that they cannot be understood either in whole or through “glimpses” of their parts. The massive network of pipelines that form part of the midstream operations that connect the oil fields to refineries constitutes both a hyperobject in its own right and part of the larger hyperobject of the petroleum industry.

Rybka’s argument is complex and interesting. He argues that the protests associated with the Enbridge pipeline in Minnesota both make this hyperobject manifest and also through their discursive (and even physical) relationship to the hyperobject become part of it. The very “stickiness” of hyperobjects, then, allows or even requires pipelines and extractive industries more broadly to become entangled with the messy histories of colonialism, protest, environmental damage, and, ultimately, the Anthropocene. Protesting the pipeline, then, goes beyond a form of activism and actually transforms the (hyper)object of protest by adhering to its sprawling, uncontrollable, and unaccountable form.

This is compelling to me, in part, because it echoes my idea that the fragmentation of modernity (and fragmentation remains the only way for us to apprehend hyperobjects and as hyperobjects — such as oil or capital(ism) — increasingly constitute a totalizing discourse, the world) aligns it both with the historical development of archaeology and its fundamental methodology. Archaeology, then, is distinctly suited to understand and transform hyperobjects because it is fundamentally a discipline of fragments. The privileged role of photography in archaeology (and especially archaeology of the contemporary world) reflects an awareness that archaeology as a discipline connects its practices, methods, and epistemologies to our world by aligning itself with these fragments (for better and for worse). 

As a bit of an aside, one of the most remarkable efforts to capture the character of oil as a hyperobject is Edward Burtynsky’s Oil (2009; cf. especially his “Oil Fields #22). Michael Truscello’s critique of Burtynsky’s photographs is particularly compelling to me. While Truscello does not reference Morton’s idea of “hyperobjects,” he sees in Burtynsky’s photography an effort to capture the distributed agency of oil and the ubiquity of petroculture. For Truscello, Burtynsky’s images disrupt the ties between the agential state that dominates a static natural world (which is defined by rigid physical borders). Oil resists this kind of domination. Always viscous, Burtynsky’s photography captures oil’s elusiveness without minimizing its impact on the surface. In Truscello’s words, Burtysky’s photographs captured and isolated “the arborescent thought that captures flows in a constant struggle with rhizomatic, open multiplicities” (Truscello 2012, 193).

In other words, Truscello (and Burtynsky) and Ribka both set out to do the same thing: wrestle with the distributed agency of oil by targeting points where the hyperobject becomes manifest. It is in these places and moments where oil becomes susceptible to critique.