Man Camp Methods

As readers of this blog know, I will head out to the western part of the state next month to conduct an archaeological evaluation of man camps associated with the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota. This work will occur in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Social Work, an architectural historian, a photographer, and a two historian/archaeologists familiar with working in North Dakota. Our plan at present is to work several days in the neighborhood of Stanley, North Dakota and then around Watford City.

Over the next few weeks, I need to come up with a method for documenting the diverse array of camps that serve to house the workers in the oil industry in Western North Dakota. With the diversity of our team, we have a whole series of overlapping research questions from those involving issues of housing to archaeological methods, aesthetics, and historical processes at play in boom areas. Creating a unified method for collecting data (and the inevitable preliminary analysis that comes along with primary data collection), will be a challenge.

My gut instinct when confronted with any archaeological data collection from the field is to create a form. This probably comes from my background in survey archaeology and its grounding in the practices of processual archaeology. The forms I imagine provide a frame work for collecting quantitative and qualitative data on a site. How big is the camp? How many units are in the camp? How are the units arranged?  These kinds of questions, of course, are easily addressed on a paper form, well-suited for entry into a spreadsheet or data base, and convenient to summarize in maps, tables or – if we collect a sufficiently robust data set – in statistical form. 

On the other hand, I have witnessed the limitations of forms in documenting complex environments. In one of the first seasons with the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey, we used a form called “the modern sweep” (for a brief description of these methods see pp. 441-442 here (pdf)). This was a densely packed one page form designed to document modern material across the survey unit. The concept was sophisticated for its time, but the rub – as so often happens – was in the execution. The form was long, complex, confusing, and frequently impossible to reconcile with the material on the ground. This was not an issue with how the form was constructed, per se, but that a form was not an ideal way to capture the diverse assemblage of modern material scattered through farmers’ fields in the Korinthia. After one season, the form was dropped.

How do I create a form to document this?

The most challenging thing about documenting the material culture around the man camps is finding the balance between the need to prompt the collection of systematic and comparable data and the urge to produce an unrealistically detailed form.

My current thinking is to prompt our recording team to document their observations based on archaeological processes like discard practices, on the one hand, and practices associated with creating social distinctions on the other. While these prompts will invariably rely upon some fairly substantial assumptions, they will also maintain a degree of interpretive transparency that a traditional form might obscure behind a veil of more narrowly descriptive fields.