Protests and Graffiti

My current chapter from my halting book project on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience is lurching forward once more. I gots some words, as the kidz say. 

The chapter is on “Ruins, Industrial Archaeology, and Cities” and my chapter weaves its way through the post-industrial city, race, and protest and will eventually deposit the bewildered reader somewhere near the intersection of urban archaeology and environmental history. Good times.   

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 (2018) 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 offered 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.

Roller connects these processes to various efforts at urban renewal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, which sought to transform the increasingly abandoned commercial districts of “coal patch” towns by demolishing buildings condemned or identified as “blighted” and polices that encouraged the redevelopment of urban spaces and concomitant development of post-industrial suburbs. Part of these efforts involved determining the place of the region’s industrial past in its future directions. The material landscape of both the mining industry as well as the strategies employed by residents to negotiate a livelihood in the highly contingent extractive economy and the region’s post-industrial present. The arrival of a new wave of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, drawn to the region by its low cost of living and availability of low skilled and light industrial work, soon met with local resistance and racial animosity. Ironically, many of the attacks against the new arrivals came from former Eastern and Southern European immigrants who came to the region to work for the coal industry a 150 years earlier. Roller’s work recognizes the complex relationship between capital, race, and nationalism inscribed on the industrial and post-industrial landscape.

Protests and Graffiti 

Such nuanced views of the impact of capital on communities and identity follow trends well-established in historical archaeology (e.g. Shackel 2009; Wurst 2014). In the archaeology of the contemporary world, this has not only manifested itself in the archaeology of industrial and post-industrial but also extends to the archaeology of protest against the way that these systems define race, class, gender and other forms of identity. As occurred in the context of the Cold War Nevada Test Site, the protests encompassed not only the testing and development of nuclear weapons, but also the appropriation of traditional range lands from the Western Shoshone and post-war American nationalism and consumerism (Schofield). The contemporary Greenham Common Airbase protests in the UK operated at the intersection of Cold War tensions and gender (Schofield and Anderton 2000) as the camps surrounding the airbase were occupied by women and children. As Schofield and Anderton observe, the uniquely gendered aspect of these protests sought to taunt the hyper-masculine militarism of the base with sexual chants, in some cases, and using the fence to display knitting, children’s clothes, and other items associated with traditional women’s life in a mock effort to beg the men in the base to allow women to repair the present and prepare for the future. Schofield and Anderton likewise recognized that the association of women, gendered tactics, and protests at the Greenham Common paralleled similar strategies developed by women during the 1984 coal workers strike and the Prostitution Collective movement that began in the mid-1970s.

The archaeology of protests is beginning to recognize the complex responses to the economic and racial challenges facing American cities in the late-20th and early-21st century. Crystal R. Simms and Julien Riel-Salvatore (2016), for example, examined the sanitary conditions of the Occupy Denver, which was part of the larger Occupy Wall Street movement, in response to claims by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper that the OD protesters were a public health and safety risk. While Simms and Riel-Salvatore faced the challenges facing any archaeological project seeking to document an active and occupied space of habitation (cf. White 2020 on similar challenges at Burning Man), they nevertheless demonstrated that many of the generalizations regarding the OD protest camp reflected it transition from a protest site to a homeless camp. In fact, their research project recognized that they collected most of the data on sanitation and safety from when chronically homeless individuals occupied the site rather than when it occupied by political protestors. The prevalence of drug paraphernalia, for example, and an outbreak of scabies seem more likely associated with challenges associated with long-term homelessness than the protestor’s encampment An effort to document the material culture of the Occupy Movement in New York’s Zuccotti Park produced photographs and descriptions which appeared on a website, were displayed and curated at Columbia University’s Archaeology Lab and featured in conference papers. While this work appears to have produced no formal publications, the assemblages and photographs demonstrate the wide range of behaviors connected to the Occupy Movement’s temporary camps and as well as patterns of distribution associated with their disruption by police. The desire the break up protest camps reflects the desire on the part of the authorities to challenge the message of the protestors by representing their actions as unsanitary and irresponsible as well as to undermine the impact of their work by breaking up the camps and obscuring their mark on the urban landscape.

The ephemeral nature of protest events, the opposition of authorities, and the complexity of protestors goals and organization often make systematic archaeological documentation of even large protests difficult. Beisaw and Olin (2020) recent call to document the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) Protest in North Dakota rests on both the disciplinary responsibility toward recognizing the diverse range of Native American claims to land and their history of protests. The authors frame their call by presenting a critical study of the efforts to preserve the Native American occupation of Alcatraz island from 1969-1971. The occupation of the island, the abandoned prison and its grounds was among only the most visible efforts of Nation Americans to reassert claims to traditional lands both in California and across the US. In recognition of the significance and visibility of this protest, the National Park Service who now manages the island as a national monument has preserved painted signs on the walls of the prison and has developed with Native American activists and scholars an exhibit room in the penitentiary museum. For Beisaw and Olin, however, the removal or failure to preserve many traces of the Native American occupation of the island and the absence of consistent interpretative signage renders this significant act of protest difficult to understand and obscure to the casual visitor. Unlike the relatively ephemeral protests of the Occupy Movement, the more literal occupation of Alcatraz Island would have left more persistent traces that could be preserved and presented to visitors. The intensity of the DAPL protests may well have left a similarly visible material trace that would offers a vital counter narrative to prevailing media view which characterize the protest camp as occupied by professional agitators seeking to escalate a conflict with oil companies and the local authorities. A more humane, diverse, and nuanced presentation of this site would complicate perceptions could call into question the close alliance of capital and militarized law enforcement and their claims to represent public order in ways that evoke the violence of the Colorado Coalfield War of the early 20th century.