Rewriting the Introduction

This week, I started the painful process of working on revisions on my book manuscript: The Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. I’ve posted a good bit of the book manuscript already to this blog and despite my awareness of my own hubris, I was not dissatisfied with it.

My series editors and some of the reviewers found it less compelling. As a result, I’m working on what will probably prove to be a major revision. The first step is revising the introduction. It is clear that the readers did not find my definition of the archaeology of the contemporary world particularly helpful. In fact, it’s place toward the end of my original introduction make it sufficiently invisible that some readers couldn’t readily find it. In my revisions this week, I decided to move my definition to the beginning of my introduction and then unpack the definition with more nuance and contextualize the definition in the history of the field throughout the rest of the introduction.

I have to admit that I’m not very satisfied with this, but, as I continually remind myself, books are not about what satisfies me as a writer, but what satisfies my audience as a reader!! Hopefully, by the end of this process, an interested reader will have the opportunity to compare my original manuscript with my revised text and find the latter to be a superior product.

Introduction

Prelude

In April of 2014, I stood with a team of archaeologists at the side of a landfill at the edge of the town of Alamogordo, New Mexico. A film crew had invited us to participate in the excavation and we were surrounded by contractors, consultants, minor celebrities, and a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers as a massive bucket loader tore into the stratigraphy of a abandoned landfill and extracted loads of household discard from the 1980s. The goal of this excavation was to confirm the urban legend that the video game maker Atari had dumped truckloads of game cartridges in the Alamogordo landfill in 1983 as it struggled to remain solvent. The excavation attracted international attention and was the climax of a documentary film that framed the dig for the Atari games as the excavation of an era in both video game development and American consumer culture (Reinhard 2015).

Some 350 miles to the west lies the Sonoran Desert. Each year hundreds of undocumented migrants attempt to cross this arid and unforgiving terrain to enter the United States. Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project documented and analyzed the material culture and forensic evidence for migrant border crossing. He interweaves archaeological evidence with ethnographic accounts of the immigrants who made the harrowing journey to cross this lethal landscape. The goal of this work was both to humanize the cost of national borders and immigration policies which rely, in part, on the Sonoran desert as a deterrent. By documenting traces of immigration across this landscape, De León’s work reveals how U.S. policy and deeply seated attitudes conspire to push the experience of our inhumane immigration policy to the margins of American consciousness. The resulting book, the Land of Open Graves (2015) is a penetrating and vivid critique of U.S. border policy and demonstrates how material culture reveals a tragic aspect of the American experience that are meant to be invisible.

In contrast, Shannon Lee Dawdy’s study of contemporary New Orleans considers the experience of time’s circuitous route through the city’s past. Her book, Patina (2016), explored how residents of post-Katrina New Orleans both experienced and understood the multiple temporalities visible in the historical fabric of the city, in heirlooms, and in the community’s vibrant rituals. In Dawdy’s hands, the visibility of patina offers a material counter argument to our faith in modern, linear progress which always values of the new over the old. In its place, she introduces the reader to the complicated and recursive history of New Orleans which embodies an experience that seems to escape the hegemonic reach of contemporary consumer culture. The value that New Orleans residents put on patina parallels in some way that the value that collectors put on the stench associated with the dirty and broken Atari cartridges excavated from a New Mexico landfill[ Link this to the first paragraph on Atari more clearly.].

Some 1,500 miles to the north, in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota, driller, pipeline “cats,” “fishers,” geologists, and even a few curious archaeologists gather for a Southern style meal in the dinning hall of a temporary “man camp” built to house the influx of people during the 21st century Bakken oil boom. Some of the units across the region installed to house temporary labor had sheltered families in Louisiana who had lost their homes from Katrina. Transported from the patinated disaster site of post-Katrina of Orleans to the boom-time contingency of North Dakota’s Bakken, the reuse of these trailers reflects a quintessentially modern landscape shaped by the flow of people, capital, and fossil fuels. The role of extractive industries in accelerating anthropogenic climate change further connects displacement caused by catastrophic weather events with the experience of oil workers in remote landscapes.

Despite their different contexts, the archaeology of patina in New Orleans and the archaeology of the contemporary Bakken oil boom both represent opportunities to interrogate the experiences of both American capitalism and global climate change. The archaeology of undocumented migration in the Sonoran Desert offers a distinctly American window to the tragic experience of transnational migration perpetrated by ponderous persistence of the modern nation-state. The Atari excavation, for all its sensationalism and frivolity, reflects the key role that technology – particular video games – played in both our collective experiences of childhood and subsequent sense of nostalgia. These contexts create a past in the present which bring together the ephemeral, the hidden, and the overlooked with the visible, material features that define the contemporary American experience. As Richard Gould observed in one of the earliest arguments for an archaeology of the contemporary world: “modern material culture studies have shown us that we are not always what we seem, even to ourselves” (Gould 1981, 65).

Defining the Field

The archaeology of the contemporary American experience exists at a dynamic intersection of traditional practices and innovative ways of understanding our relationship with the past and present. This means that the range of contributions present in this book sketch out a definition of archaeology of the contemporary that is both expansive and provisional. The work presented here ranges from systematic excavations and surveys to more casual efforts to document the materiality of the present. The understanding of archaeology reflects the cross pollination of the discipline by other social sciences such as the ethnographic practices associated with sociology and cultural anthropology as well as the approaches associated with critical theory and developed by the humanities. For example, this book will explore the influence of sociologists such as Daniel Miller on how we understand contemporary consumer culture and identity. It will also explore the intersection digital archaeology and the field of media archaeology, which is informed more by a Foucauldian understanding of the concept of archaeology (Foucault) than one associated with disciplinary practice. This expansive array of approaches reflects an effort to remain true to the development of the archaeology of the contemporary world as well as current practices.

The chronological definition of the contemporary world is similarly complex. To emphasize the contemporaneity of my experience, as a white, male, academic archaeologist born in 1972, I have included brief first person preludes to each chapter that serve a brief reminders of chronological coincidence of my perspectives and experience with the objects, situations, landscapes, and contexts that this work studies. My own view of the contemporary world has less to do with some narrow period centered on the present, and more to do with the complex economic, political, and social conditions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This period saw the ascendence of neoliberal economic programs, the development of the internet and greater access to digital technologies, an accelerated pace of globalization with the end of the Cold War, and a growing anxiety surrounding the human wrought changes in the environment. This conveniently coincides with material that falls within the last 50 years and outside of the conventional (and legal) definitions of protected heritage in the United States. At the same time, I recognize that my positionality informs my experience of time and contemporaneity and my experience of contemporary political, economic, and social regimes. For diaspora communities, indigenous communities, Black communities, and recent immigrants, as just a few examples, the concept of the contemporary might be narrowly circumscribed by the experience of migration or might extend generations through collective memories of an irreducible landscape or the nefarious working of intergeneration trauma. This book acknowledges the complicity of academic institutions and archaeology in promoting the linear view of progress which served often to overwrite alternate forms of temporal experience. While this book’s dependence on my own sense of the contemporary will invariably shape its perspective, I will also make efforts to recognize the work of Shannon Lee Dawdy, Laurent Olivier, and Alfredo González-Ruibal in appreciating the role of the most distant past in the present and how the interplay between the past and the contemporary complicates the persistent linearity of the modern narrative.

As for the geographic definition of this work, most of the examples will derive from North America and the United States more narrowly. In this way, the book recognizes and seeks to trace a distinctive character of the American experience in way that reflects the priorities present in the field of historical archaeology (as well as elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences where national specialties remain prominent). At the same time, trends in globalization and the increasingly fluid movement of goods, capital, and individuals over the last 50 years has introduced significant complexity to traditional definitions of historically constituted regions. The concept of “late sovereignty” (Walker 2003) for example, articulates the increasingly blurred boundaries that define the authority of sovereign states in the 21st century. The political and economic power of multinational corporations and the reach of the internet across national boundaries contributes to a declining sense of geographically defined cultures and experiences. The rise of non-descript non-places at a global scale and the mass movement of populations displaced by political and economic forces has complicate our expectation of distinctly national experience.