Independent Research

Unearthing Roots

Visualizing the understories of gold mining in Ghana

Unearthing Roots began with a personal loss and a changing landscape. Following my grandfather’s death in 2024, I began reflecting on the future of my family’s ancestral lands in Ghana, where gold extraction had disrupted cocoa cultivation, stripped vegetation, and transformed farmlands into degraded landscapes. These reflections coincided with nationwide protests against galamsey, a term derived from the phrase “gather them and sell”, prompting a return to my roots in June 2025 to investigate how gold mining has reshaped the relationships between lands, ecology, cultural knowledge, and livelihoods.

Aerial photograph of a river and mining landscape in Ghana, overlaid with a map of Ghana’s geology and archival field photography of people panning for gold in a stream. — Figure 1. Ghana's gold-bearing rock formations, and galamsey's origins in stream panning.

Argument: Ghana’s gold-mining landscapes are world-ecological formations where geology, cultural beliefs, labor, vegetation, water, and other livelihood forms intersect. Tracing the shift from indigenous prospecting through colonial concessions to contemporary galamsey reveals how extraction has transformed and distributed its benefits and environmental costs unevenly. Drawing on Akan and Asante cosmologies, Gilles Clément’s The Third Landscape, Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, the project proposes restorative spatial pluralism: reorganizing altered landscapes to support ecological repair, cultural continuity, and livelihoods without erasing their histories or competing claims.

A spread of living agricultural soil, a circular diagram of sacred gold weights in Akan cosmology, and photographs of the gold rush in cocoa farmlands and the land degradation caused by galamsey. — Figure 2. Sacred weights of gold, the shift to the gold rush in cocoa farmlands, and the expansive land degradation caused by galamsey.

A dark diagram of spiritually guided indigenous prospecting, figures walking the land above rooted trees and vertical shafts of gold-bearing earth, with an oral account set in a text panel. — Figure 3. Spiritually-guided indigenous prospecting: Charms tied to the feet, and a stillness in the body prompted exactly where to dig.

Scope and Method: This project traces three overlapping regimes of gold extraction in Ghana: spiritually guided indigenous prospecting, colonial concession mining, and contemporary galamsey. The Fieldwork in Ashanti, Western, and Northern regions combined interviews with traditional authorities, field photography, documentation of indigenous mining traces, and observation of active mining, ore processing, and degraded landscapes. These materials were studied alongside archived mining records, then compared through historical and spatial analysis. Mapping aboveground and underground conditions helped trace how extraction practices have altered land use, labor, vegetation, waterways, and settlement.

A colonial-era Ashanti Goldfields concession map beside photographs of an underground mine shaft with rail tracks, documenting industrial gold mining. — Figure 4. Colonial industrial mining

Two miners working at a sluice box beside sandbag-lined pits, with sheet-roofed shelters and mounded earth behind them. — Figure 5. The use of mercury in gold amalgamation.

Repositioning: This body of work contributes to a new design paradigm by grounding biodiversity-sensitive response in the cultural and ecological histories of mining landscapes. It connects extraction and labor across material, landscape, and territorial scales, while considering how soil, water, vegetation, cultivation, and human settlements depend on and transform one another. By bringing indigenous ecological knowledge into dialogue with spatial analysis and design, Unearthing Roots approaches the pluriverse as a recognition of different ways of understanding and inhabiting land. Restorative spatial pluralism proposes a framework for negotiating ecological health, productive use, and cultural continuity within landscapes already transformed by extraction.

A wide photograph of an abandoned open mining pit, with a figure at the edge of the excavation looking across the cut earth. — Figure 6. From abandoned, mercury-laden tailings toward a reworked ground of reclaimed soil, controlled infill, and shared productive use.

A proposal drawing titled “Proposed Landscape Restoration Strategy”: a regenerated post-mining landscape of winding paths, planted vetiver grass, mushrooms, and carved tree sculptures, annotated with restoration measures. — Figure 6. From abandoned, mercury-laden tailings toward a reworked ground of reclaimed soil, controlled infill, and shared productive use.

Photograph of an immersive exhibition room at the Yale School of Architecture, a wraparound photographic mural of a mining landscape with visitors examining it. — Figure 7. Visual Immersive Experience from Presentation at Yale School of Architecture, circa. 2026