One of the main aims of the COST Action in general is to increase networking, to support interdisciplinary 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 with WG1 – Heritage, WG3 – Archaeology and WG4 – Environmental History. The main organiser 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 deliverable of WG4, which is 3-reviews related to mediaval (lead by Aleksandra Fostikova), resin (lead by Meta Remec), charcoal (lead by Anna Varga) in terms of environmental history and biocultural diversity of the productions.
At 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, 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 information. Then Koen Deforce chaired a WG3 Archaeology session where archaeological databases were discussed. The next session was chaired by Jiří Woitsch and was dedicated to WG1-Heritage and discussed „Educational trail” and stakeholder database. We closed the workshop with a „field trip” to the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, where we visited the virtual collections 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. We are very grateful to the museum’s colleagues, especially Miha Špiček, Slovene Ethnographic Museum, Head of Documentation Department and for their excellent guidance!
