Introductions and Conclusions in an Age of Revision

This week, I plan to slide into spring break where I’m going to literally take a break from some of the work that I’ve been grinding on this past few months and focus on projects that will give me a quick hit of satisfaction that’ll fade almost as quickly. 

But for now, I wanted to share a bit of an updated lede and conclusion for my chapter on camps and campuses that is part of book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. These updated and I hope offer a bit of a coherent and cohesive perspective of the chapter, which regular readers of my blog will recognize from the last few weeks (which you can catch up on here, here, and here). 

With these revisions, I’m down to two more chapter and the conclusion to get preliminary revisions done before the end of the academic year. This seems unlikely, but not impossible (which feels like my mantra these days).

Lede

A casual visitor traveling the main arteries through western North Dakota at the height of the Bakken oil boom would be struck by the proliferation of workforce housing sites. The most elaborate forms of so-called man camps lined the major routes through the oil patch and presented neatly arranged grids of modular housing surrounded larger common buildings. They typically featured imposing fences, access control points, and more often than not parking lots full of idling deisel trucks waiting for their drivers return at the start of the next shift. These camps evoked the well-structured order of military bases. In fact, some of the same companies that provided modular housing for short-term workers in the US also provided the same kind of modular housing for military personnel on deployment in the Middle East. When combined with the military-style uniforms of many oil field workers (complete with America flag patches which contribute to a general atmosphere of “petro-masculinity” (Daggett 2018)), it is hardly surprising that the landscape of the Bakken oil patch led us to consider parallels in the world of military camps. The parallels between the global reach of the American military and American extractive industries reflects changes in the scope of the American experience in the post-World War II era. In particular, our efforts to document workforce housing in the Bakken drew our attention to how the global character of the American military and industrial experience informed local forms and experiences in North Dakota. Just as hardened borders drew upon the architecture and material culture of the Cold War, so the modular character of turn-of-the-21st–century military bases in the Persian Gulf shared features with workforce housing in another oil rich region. Despite the geographic remoteness of life in the Bakken oil patch, the experience evoked global trends in modular, temporary housing.

At the same time, the nights that we spent in workforce housing in the Bakken invariably reminded us of our time on college campuses. The central place of a dinning hall, the dormitory style accommodations, and the neatly arranged pathways and exteriors of the building emphasize tidiness, order, and control. The interior space of workforce housing sites sought to promote efficient recovering from difficult and taxing work, a certain amount of controlled camaraderie over meals, and a limited opportunities for recreation. The external appearance of order was especially significant for the largest and most institutional camps as they sought to allay the concerns of surrounding communities that the influx of oil workers to the region would bring social disruptions including an increase in crime and violence. While the potted flowers, hotel-grade furnishings, and buffet meals in the various workforce housing sites where we stayed and visited rarely reached the level of contemporary college amenities, the sense of orderly convenience that pervaded the most formal workforce drew us to consider the parallel between camps and campuses from an archaeological perspective.

Both military bases and college campuses shared the orderly arrangement of housing, dining serves, and access points, despite operating opposite poles on the contemporary ideological spectrum. The similarities reflect the shared traditions of shaping young people in body and mind and and efforts to celebrate and enforce conformity and suppress both resistance itself and evidence for its successes. In this way, camps and campuses attempt to privilege the outward appearance of order and tradition in ways that often make it difficult to discern change and the complexities of life within these institutions. The archaeology of the contemporary world offers a method for revealing the kinds of processes that these sites have tended to obscure and to reveal a sense of dynamism to landscapes that privilege tradition. In this sense, archaeology of the contemporary world offers perspectives of the American experiences that extends beyond topdown views of institutional control and emphasizes the sometimes tragic consequences of dissimulation and new ways to recognize and understand resistance.

Conclusion

Studying military bases and school and college campuses may seem quite a stretch from workforce housing sites in the Bakken, but both campus and camps represent two contemporary examples of landscapes of control. These sites, however, tell more complex stories when subjected to archaeological investigation. Just as the archaeology of border crossing, forced migrants, and the homeless reveals traces of lives obscured, the archaeology of military installations, protest camps adjacent to bases, research sites, and the tidy spaces of the “ivory tower” and bording and residential schools demonstrates how systematic fieldwork can reveal hidden complexities even amid the most controlled and well-organized spaces of our contemporary world. The way that the persistent grid of cement pads at Slab City continues to order the squatter community at the site offers a particularly tangible example of the influence of military architecture on the American landscape which has come to characterize our national borders, our internal landscapes, and even our expansion into outer space. The neat records and arrangements, however, often serve to hide the long term impacts on military activity in the landscape or the creative efforts to adapt military plans to the new needs and functions. In other cases, the archaeology of college and school campus reveal how students experience sometimes defies to military discipline and the architecture of control. The tragic events at Indian boarding and residential schools and the Dozier School for boys make clear the orderly external appearance of schools can obscure horrors. At the same time, efforts to document student life on campus and at boarding schools has revealed myriad ways in which studies resisted control, preserved their cultures and identities, and undermined efforts to produce discipline bodies. Thus, archaeology of the contemporary world lays bare the disconnect between strategies of control and resistance in the past and provides a basis for understanding and commemorating both invisible impacts of military activities and survivance of groups and individuals whose experiences shaped their lives.

Efforts to document military bases and school and college campuses might appear at quite a remove from our efforts to document workforce housing in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. This work, however, provided me with a model for understanding the tension between efforts to produce outward expressions of control, through controlled access points, tall fences, and the tidy uniformity of corporate workforce housing sites, and the realities facing workers in North Dakota as they seek to balance the brutal winters, the difficult housing markets, and their own desire for autonomy in an environment defined by efficiencies and profits.