Anna Varga, Meta Remec, Nina Osep,
Koen Deforce, Oliver Nelle, Péter Szabó, Katja Tikka, Jiří Woitsch
The main aims of the COST Action in general are to increase networking, to support interdisciplinarity, and to include new ideas based on existing scientific and other stakeholder knowledge. We can say that we had a 2-day workshop on 29-30 January, which involved all of them. The workshop was hosted by the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The local organisers were Dr. Meta Remec and Nina Osep – PhD student. From our COST Action, the event was co-organised byWG1 – Heritage, WG3 – Archaeology and WG4 – Environmental History. The main organizer was Dr. Anna Varga, the leader of WG4.
We had 62 registered participants from all over Europe, 21 people could attend in person, the others had the opportunity to join online.
On the first day we had an „introduction” session based on photos of PoTaRCh provided by the participants. The rest of the day we had insightful discussions about the main deliverables of WG4, which are 3-reviews related to the Middle Ages (led by Aleksandra Fostikov), resin (led by Meta Remec) and charcoal (led by Anna Varga) in terms of environmental history and biocultural diversity of the productions.
During the last session, we had special guests, Jože Prah and Marija Imperl, the chairman and one of the members of the Slovenian Charcoal Burner Association. They presented the current state of charcoal burning in Slovenia and the various activities of the Association and invited everyone to the charcoal-burner meeting on 10 May in Nova Gorica, the European Capital of Culture for 2025.
On the second day, Katja Tikka, Grants Coordinator of our COST Action, introduced the different grant calls and provided information about applying for the grants. After the presentation the audience had an opportunity to ask some questions. Then Koen Deforce chaired a WG3 Archaeology session where the construction of a database of archaeological remains of Portarch production was discussed. The next session was chaired by Jiří Woitsch and was dedicated to WG1-Heritage and discussed the „Educational trail” and stakeholder database. We closed the workshop with a „field trip” to the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, where we visited the virtual collections (by Miha Špiček, Slovene Ethnographic Museum, Head of Documentation Department) and permanent exhibitions and had the opportunity to see archive photos of charcoal production and learn interesting stories about the role of charcoal in Slovenian traditions.