Industrial Archaeology Again

This weekend, I read the most recent issue ofIA: the Journal of Industrial Archaeology (2017 [2020]). This is a journal that has hung out at the fringes of my scholarly awareness for about a decade now, but this is the first time that I actually just hung out with an issue (and it’s PAPER no less!). 

I’ve been working on a chapter that looks at industrial archaeology of the contemporary world (as well as ruins and the archaeology of contemporary cities) and wanted to do a high altitude survey of what’s been going on in the field of industrial archaeology over the last 20 years or so. The issue is pretty idiosyncratic, so it’s not necessarily a great place to find a survey of the field (for that kind of work, check out Hilary Orange’s recent review article in Post-Medieval Archaeology or in Patrimonio: Arqueologia Industrial).

Instead, I was completely charmed by Jeff Benjamin’s article, “Ariadne’s Gift: The Archaeological Record of Industry” which considers industrial archaeology in the context of the Anthropocene. Ariadne’s gift, of course, was the ball of string given to Theseus which allowed him to find his way out of the labyrinth built by Daedalus’s to imprison the Minotaur. For Benjamin the archaeology of the industrial past offer a way to unravel the history of the anthropocene and, more importantly, provide ideas for how to escape from the prison that environmental degradation and climate change have created for humanity. The diverse range of approaches and foci present in archaeology – from considerations of identity to awareness of ecological context, ability to work across temporal scales, and sensitivity to the performative and affect – allows the archaeologist of industry a distinct perspective on our contemporary situation. Moreover, the development of an archaeology of industry, allows us to understand industrialization as an event with its own chronological and temporal boundaries that is both compelling and – at times – repelling to the researcher.

Benjamin’s description of the archaeology of industry embodies many of my own experience doing research in the Bakken oilfield where I am simultaneously enthralled by the scale, complexity, and aesthetics of oil production while at the same time repelled by its socially, environmentally, and economically divisive and destructive potential. The ability to recognize and understand the industrial as a bounded object or event while also the fundamental structuring situation of our contemporary existence offered a distinctive position for both critique and understanding. We recognize in industrial practices and industrial archaeology the event horizon of our own way of life. 

The second article in the issue is also worthy of note, Jonathan Gardiner’s “The Industrial Archaeology of the Archaeology Industry.” While I haven’t made my way through this article in a thoughtful and deliberate way yet, it appears to be another contribution to the growing number of articles that explore the archaeology of archaeology as both a discipline and practice. The tendency for archaeologists to occlude (or at least not treat with the same critical attention) the archaeological evidence for past archaeological work not only speaks to the certain notions of archaeological time in which all archaeological work becomes essentially contemporary, but also to our own tendency in disciplinary practice to “black box” many processes that give rise to our scientific knowledge.

More on this in the future.