Abstracting My Book

One of the more frustrating and time consuming exercises involved in submitting my book manuscript was producing an abstract not just for the book, but for every chapter of the book. I tried to think of this as somehow a useful exercise (for me as an author) or even as some kind of “victory lap,” but I really couldn’t. 

It was a pain and a concession to the growing desire by publishers to market books in disaggregated ways through various digital portals. I suspect the abstracts also help make our work more visible to various search engines and content aggregators that crawl the web. It’s a nice example of how changes in technology and new ways of generating revenue create additional work for writers (and publishers) throughout the process. 

The Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience

The Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience surveys the recent develop of the archaeology of the contemporary world in an American context. After an introduction which provides a provisional definition of the archaeology of the American experience and a brief survey of its roots in American historical archaeology, two extended case studies structure the book. The first case study appears in the first chapter and introduces the excavation of an assemblage of Atari games from a municipal landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The second case study, which appears at the end of the book, explores the archaeology of temporary workforce housing in the Western North Dakota’s Bakken oil boom. These studies serve as bookends for chapters that frame discussions of the archaeology of garbage, things, and digital media and devices in the first part of the book. These chapters also situate the contemporary American experience in a global context that follows the impact of extractive industries, manufacturing and discard practices which makes our technologies and consumer culture possible. Chapters in the second part of the book feature discussions of the archaeology migrant camps, homelessness, military bases, residential schools and campuses, and urbanism. These surveys provides a diverse contexts for workforce housing sites in the Bakken as well as a window into the diverse situations that constitute the American experience. A brief afterword demonstrates how this book and the contemporary experience are always provisional. 

Introduction

This chapter begins in the New Mexico desert and then introduces a series of case studies designed to orient the reader toward recent work in the archaeology of contemporary American. It then proceeded to offer a provisional definition of the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. It anchors this definition in the development of archaeological methodology, a critical understanding of the concept of an American experience, a brief reflection on the concept of the contemporary, and the history of the American historical archaeology. The introduction concludes with a brief description of the organization of the book and an apologia for what this book is not.

Chapter 1: The Alamogordo Atari Excavation

This chapter provides a report on an excavation in the New Mexico desert designed to determine whether the Alamogordo landfill became the final destination for a large assemblage of Atari games dumped there at the site in 1983. It describes the structure of the landfill, the character of both the landfill and the Atari assemblage, and offers some basic analysis of this dig. This analysis situates the Atari excavations in the context of the archaeology of the contemporary world, the history of the post-war American West, and contemporary nostalgia for childhood.

Chapter 2: Garbology and the Archaeology of Trash

This chapter connects the origins of the archaeology of contemporary America with William Rathje’s famous Garbage Project at the University of Arizona. This project began in 1973 when Rathje and students started to document household trash in Tucson, Arizona as a window into contemporary consumption patters. Their work drew upon both late-20th-century political and environmental concerns for trash as well as archaeology’s long history of interest in discarded objects as a source for our understanding. The chapter concludes some more recent work on the archaeology of contemporary garbage and shows how the archaeology of trash is both part of and informs the experience of American consumer culture.

Chapter 3: Things, Agency, and the American Experience

This chapter explores the archaeology of contemporary American consumer culture. It situates the growth in interest in things among archaeologists (and other commentators) amid the popular critique of consumerism in the 1970s and 1980s as well as commodity fetishism rooted in Marxist criticism. The chapter then goes on to explore how this interest in objects as archaeological artifacts has developed into an appreciation of things as more than just evidence for past culture but as active participants in the production of culture. Such perspectives have also informed the recent views of objects as having agency in the creation of a distinctive American experience. 

Chapter 4: Music, Media Archaeology and Digital Experiences

This chapter considers the archaeology of music, media, and video games. The archaeology of contemporary music includes work documentating of historic venues, recording sites associated with music production, and the study of objects like vinyl records that preserve evidence for the consumption and circulation of music. In this way, the archaeology of the contemporary world has parallels with the field of media archaeology. The late-20th-century rise in digital devices, manufactured abroad and dependent on rare minerals to function, traces the global consequences of the American media consumption. The archaeology in and of video games demonstrates how these technologies produce new, ephemeral, but no less distinctively American experiences.  

Chapter 5: Borders, Migrants, and Homelessness at the Edge of the American Experience

This chapter marks the beginning of the second half of the book which traces the research that contextualized the author’s study of temporary workforce housing during the Bakken oil boom. The chapter surveys recent work on the archaeology of borders, migrant camps, and homelessness. It demonstrates how this scholarship offers significant critiques contemporary political and economic conditions central to the American experience. It also contribute to how we understand individual agency in the adaptation of short-term housing and the production of home. 

Chapter 6: Military Bases, Campuses, and Disciplining the American Experience 

This chapter briefly compares workforce housing sites in the Bakken to military bases before proceeding to explore how military bases, universities, and residential school campuses created distinctive experiences. It shows how the archaeology of military installations and campuses reveals the limits to the discipline that these places sought to impose. Archaeology of these sites also makes visible evidence for resistance in places designed to enforce conformity, in part, by obscuring traces of individual or collective identities. Particular attention to archaeological studies of Indian Residential schools reveals that these campuses often failed to prevent students from enacting their Native American identities. Archaeological documentation of military bases revealed complexity in the Cold War experience that documentary sources sometimes overlook.

Chapter 7: The City, Ruins, and Protests in the American Experience 

This chapter recognizes new forms of urbanism and ruins that constitute a common backdrop to the post-industrial American experience and in extractive landscape of the Bakken. The archaeology of American cities and their hinterlands offers a perspective on the transformation of the late-20th and early-21st century cites and contextualizes recent protests for racial equality. This chapter also recognizes the growing role of archaeology in tracing the relationship between cities, their environment, and the infrastructure necessary to maintain our contemporary mode of existence.

Chapter 8: Extractive Industries and Global Change

With this chapter, the book finally arrives in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch. It provides a summary of the research of the North Dakota Map Camp Project. The chapter then considers how the study of workforce housing during an oil boom is Western North Dakota can provide insights into changing attitudes toward domesticity, labor, and global climate change. This chapter serves as a provisional conclusion to the book, but also acknowledges that the contemporary is a dynamic, complex, and continuous experience that resists reduction to specific circumstances.

Afterword

This chapter concludes the book by acknowledging that the American experience is increasingly the product of global connections. It also acknowledges that the concept of the contemporary is culturally, socially, and situationally fluid. As a result, a book on the contemporary American experience can appear out of step with events taking place while the book was being written and revised. A book started only a year later would have likely considered more carefully situations ranging from the COVID pandemic to the protests following the murder of George Floyd and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Appendix

This appendix offers a very brief analysis of my citational practices in this book. It also includes a short survey of similar efforts in American archaeology.