Industrial Archaeology and the Archaeology of Labor

Over the last week, I’ve been trying to jump start my somewhat stalled book project by figuring out how to get the penultimate chapter from a series of loosely connected ideas to a formal statement on paper.

Part of what I’m wrestling with is the complex history of urban and industrial archaeology in the US and its intersection with archaeology of the contemporary world. Since it’s Monday morning and I’m struggling to get some momentum, I thought I’d put together a bit of a brain storm.

Industrial archaeology, that is the archaeology of industrial sites, gained significant momentum during the post-war war period particularly in the UK. Like the archaeology of military sites, there was a growing concern that the changing economic and political position of the UK would lead to the disappearance of 20th century sites that once defined its status in the world. Investment in documenting and preserving military and industrial sites, then, stands against the backdrop of changes to the global economic and political order. The decline in manufacturing, in particular, resulted in changing attitudes toward increasingly abandoned industrial sites and the UK’s industrial heritage more broadly.

At first, it appears that most industrial archaeology stood outside the academic, or even professional, branch of the discipline. In the 1950s and 1960s, amateur archaeologists collected information, objects, and photographs about sites in their area. They were often motivated by nostalgia or connections to companies who had occupied various sites or facilities (Symond 2005). The emphasis on sites associated with the recent industrial heritage of a region or standing buildings initially distanced industrial archaeology from the mainstream discipline (Palmer 2005). Moreover, industrial archaeology’s tendency to focus on the details of technological development rather than their larger social significance likewise set industrial archaeology apart from trends that were emerging in the field of Post-Medieval archaeology in the UK and historical archaeology in the US.

In many ways, the traditions of amateur practice has continued into the 21st century even as industrial archaeology has found more of a home in the academic and professional discipline. It is hardly surprising that a forum on ruin photography appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Contemporary Archaeology (2014). The romantic elements of ruin photography, for example, often privileges the aesthetics of the buildings and the photography over aspects of formal interest to archaeologists. While Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2014) have argued that ruin photography far from standing outside archaeological practices provides an opportunity for the critical reflection on photography and ruins as the contexts for archaeological performance, affective engagements with the past, and long-standing archaeological documentation practices. The ability to observe the decay of the ruins which continues even in the absence of human intervention stands as a reminder of the agency of things. Their affective character ruins evoked through the  photographers lens and through the photographers “engagement with the ruins” finds parallels in the use of ruins as the backdrop to theatrical performances from the Theater of Dionysos in Athens to abandoned factories around the post-industrial world (Murray 2020)  Krysta Ryzewski, however, notes that the desire for certain aesthetic effects runs has real political risks as they shape the public perception of cities like Detroit. The absence of individuals from ruin photographs, their lack of context, and their limited scale, as just the most obvious critiques of this genre, risks representing post-industrialized cities like Detroit as depopulated wastelands rather that communities experiencing vibrancy and facing real social and economic challenges.   

The critiques of ruin porn offered by scholars such as Ryzewski (2014) and Paul Mullins (2012; 2014) emphasize that the removal of individuals from ruin photography, and these  criticisms find parallels with recent work in industrial archaeology. As LouAnn Wurst (2016), Paul Shackel (2009) and others have noted the emphasis on technological advancement in industrial archaeology has tended to marginalize the role of labor. By drawing industrial archaeology more fully into the field of historical archaeology, scholars have turned more attention to the role of industrial labor in shaping communities, class, and individual identity. Projects such as the Randall Maguire’s Colorado Coalfield War project sought to center the project on labor relationships both in the archaeology of the early 20th-century Ludlow Massacre site and in its modern effort to engage with organized labor in the region. Michael Roller’s research in and around the coal mining toward of Pardeesville, Pennsylvania considered the long reach of structural violence at the intersection of race, labor, and class in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region which continues to play a role in the lives of contemporary residents. Various short term efforts to revive the economy in the region has involved shifting the economy to increasing casual labor. Situated amid the decaying industrial structures of the coal industry, light industrial work and warehouses offer short-term and irregular employment opportunities for these communities, and capital from outside the region see in these post-industrial communities pools of low-cost labor. Such expansive views of the impact of capital on labor and communities could easily extend to the archaeology of protest events like the Occupy movement.