Struggling with Revisions: Fragments and Explanations

I’m very nearly out of gas this semester and struggling mightily to finish the revisions on my book about the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. Yesterday afternoon I declared myself DONE with the penultimate chapter, leaving myself one more chapter to finish before I decamp for Cyprus and Greece in mid-May.

Fortunately my final chapter is among the stronger chapters in the book or at least the most complete. The last chapter that I revised unfortunately devolved into a bit of a catch all for various elements that didn’t neatly fit into other chapters. Fortunately there was a clear thread of ideas that connect these superficially disparate concepts. The chapter starts with a discussion of industrial ruins, ruin porn, and urban decay before shifting to a discussion of protests with an emphasis on urban protests typified by the George Floyd protests of 2020 and the Occupy Movement. The final section of the chapter considers the urban context for these protests before locating the cities within more expansive networks of resources. I posted a bit of this last section last week, I think.

The most challenging element of this chapter is integrating it within the structure of my book. Those of you who read my blog consistently might remember that two case studies anchor my book: the first chapter describes the excavation of the Atari games in the Alamogordo desert and the final chapter considers my research in the Bakken oil patch. The intervening chapter trace my research into archaeology of the contemporary world as I seek to come to terms with and understand the relevance of my field work. Thus, the second half of the book considers sites and contexts that I explored in my efforts to make sense of the data collected during my time in the Bakken. As a result, the entire book serves as a pair of case studies that extends from field work to the related research that I conducted over the last decade of my academic career. 

Unfortunately, this organization means that certain things get left out of the book or, as I do in this penultimate chapter, that I encountered debates and discussions that don’t directly relate to my work in the Bakken but are nevertheless relevant for a student interested in the archaeology of the contemporary American experience more broadly. This odd move involves a bit of explanation and even some interpretative gymnastics to ensure that the entire book hangs together. At best, I nail my landings and everything comes together perfectly; at worst, parts of my book are perhaps “too authentic” representations of how messy research can be.

Today, I’m posted a bit of my lede into the chapter where I try to explain how this chapter fits into my book. It is probably more messy than elegant, but it is authentic.

The orderly arrangement of workforce housing camps offers one pole in our experience of the Bakken oil patch. Our efforts to document workforce housing camps and their wider context compelled us to engage with not only with unfamiliar forms of urbanism and settlement, but also with a vast industrial landscape. This experience led us to research not only the archaeology of camps and campuses, as we discussed in the last chapter, but also the archaeology of contemporary cities and their ruins. As we engaged with this material, we recognized the need to expand our perspectives from the tidy and controlled appearance of many workforce housing sites to the more chaotic and ad hoc arrangement of spaces of work and rest across the Bakken more broadly. The landscape reflected the tension between the aspirations for the orderly extraction of oil from sometimes unruly and reticent Bakken formation itself.

The next chapter considers the productive intersection of the archaeology of the industrial ruins, protests, and the contemporary city. As we crisscrossed the Bakken oil patch of Western North Dakota following pipelines and identifying housing, tank farms, and gas compression stations, we shared some of the experiences of urban explorers who marveled at the complexities of the industrial landscapes of factories in Detroit and hidden infrastructure in Los Angeles. At the same time, we notices evidence for past boom and anticipated the future ruins of the early 21st century frenzy of oil exploration and extractions. Reading scholarship on the archaeology of the contemporary city while witnessing the 2020 protests following the killing of George Floyd immediately revealed the limits of our Bakken case study for exploring the incredible outpouring of significant scholarship on the past and present of the contemporary city. As a result, this chapter gladly distends both the limits of our case-based approach to defining the field and the chronological boundaries of the contemporary world itself. As cities epitomize the juxtaposition of the physical traces of past and present experiences, they necessarily push the archaeology of the contemporary world to recognize multiple definitions of the contemporary as we noted in the introduction to this book. Recent protests whether along the route of the Dakota Access Pipeline or amid the monuments of the city remind us that the past is very much present in the contemporary world and encourage us to continually challenge overly narrow disciplinary definitions of chronology and space. While this chapter originated amid the drill rigs and tank farms of the contemporary Bakken oil boom, it will go beyond the questions of extraction, industrial production, and urbanism to show how archaeology of the contemporary world offers opportunities to critique the expectations of capitalism and modern aspirations for production and consumption. Scenes of protest set against the overstated claims of economic development as well as the haunting specters of abandonment and decay trace the uneven rewards of capitalism and the blurry boundaries between the human and natural worlds.