Paper short abstract:

The gypsum's Park is created for preserve the landscape from contemporaney mining extraction. This create a different perception between original landscape and a mining one. What happen when an archeological discovery transform the natural landscape in an ancient mining district of Roman Empire?

Paper long abstract:

This paper starts from an ethnographic fieldwork done in an Italian Natural Park: The Romagna's gypsum mountain park. A place where geology and rocks have a special identity and heritage status. With the creation of the Park, the gypsum as a rock becomes a valuable geological landscape in itself: a perception and vision that coexist with a large quarry of the same mineral; a presence able to generate an antithetical mining's landscape. In this perspective there is a dialectical conflict between different actors. Farmers, politicians, environmentalists, cavers, tour operators and government officials are competitors in imagining the true nature of gypsum and drawing up a moral code. The anthropological fieldwork has led to an unexpected archeological discovery that give a new temporal dimension about landscape and mining activity. Places thought as pristine Nature, have changed their status becoming archaeological sites of an intensive pre-industrial and long-time mining activity by the Roman Empire. The entire territory of the park appears today as the ancient site of extraction of a particular kind of transparent gypsum, called by the ancient romans Lapis Specularis. A rare and precious material used in place of glass in the windows of all imperial luxury houses. This ancient trans-mediterranean trade shifts in the deep time the mining vocation of the area and totally changes the perception of natural and un-natural geoscape. The Lapis Specularis, from geological object becomes historical actor, able to link different times and have agency in the contemporary human relationship and policies with the landscape.