Peter wrote:
>I must admit this is one issue of Mining History I will probably never
>read. To my mind it's just not related to any aspect of mining history
>which might be interesting - effectively it appears to be just morbid
>curiosity.
I cannot speak from an historical point of view, but from an archaeological viewpoint morbidity, curious or otherwise, would not enter into it. Archaeology is neither history or anthropology but an autonomous discipline consisting of a method and set of specialized techniques for the gathering or 'production' of cultural information. Operationally, archaeology has come to mean the study of past human societies and their environments with the primary aims of recovery, recording, analysing and classifying archaeological material.
Therefore, whilst stories told around the fire on a wild winters night about travellers vanishing on moors strewn with open mine shafts may seem irrelevant, they are never-the-less oral traditions of important cultural information regarding that human society and their environments and should be recorded, analysed and classified in the same way as any artefact recovered from a mine.
Trevor
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