Three Things Thursday: Lead Pipes, Mouses, and Flood Walls

It’s something like week 12 of the semester and I’m all over the map. This feels like as good a time for a Three Things Thursday as any. 

Thing the First

My colleague Ty Reese pointed out to me that the city of Grand Forks recently published online a map showing the lead service pipes present in town. It’s exactly the kind of contemporary infrastructure document that tells stories about the city. It also fits in with our growing interest in the infrastructure of water in the city (here and here).

If you check out the map it’s fascinating to consider the distribution of lead pipes. It is easy to associate these pipes with the older sections of the city. What’s more interesting, though, is trying to understand where the lead pipes have been replaced (and based on the the kind of replacement pipe, when were they replaced). It would be fascinating, for example, to compare the distribution of lead pipes with home size, lot size, tax value, and age. Is there a pattern for where, when, and how certain homes had lead pipes replaced? 

Of course, the map has a lot of “unknowns” on it, but a clever GIS person with access to the right data maybe could speculate on the whether these unknown pipes are likely to be lead, copper, galvanized, or even plastic!  

Thing the Second

I was completely charmed by the article from Robyn Faith Walsh in The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 22 (2024) titled “The Mouse of the Mysteries.” As title suggests, this is a cleverly updated version of the David Macaulay book Motel of the Mysteries which would be familiar to anyone seeking to introduce students to the practice of archaeological interpretation.

Walsh’s article is set in 4025 and attempts to understand the rise of the mouse cult in a post-catastrophe world. The discovery of a center of the mouse cult in a submerged area in the what was formerly the southern region of the United States linked domestic cult practices with a larger center that evidently had parallels in both the western part of North America and in the area around Paris, France. 

The articles is clever enough and sincere enough to challenge students to unpack the series of intellectual, methodological, and even epistemological leaps made by the author to come to her conclusions. In other words, the article is rigorous as far as fictional archaeology goes, but still vulnerable enough that student should be able to critique the assumptions on which it rests in pedagogically and intellectually productive ways. 

Thing the Third

When I get very stressed, my attention begins to scatter and I start to make questionable decisions. For example, this week I decided it was as good a time as any to start reading Steve Conn’s The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t (Chicago 2023). 

I got to know the author a little bit many years ago at Ohio State when he would occasionally join our regular basketball games at Jesse Owens North. I knew his earlier work on museums, but less familiar with his work on rural America. So when there was a bit of buzz about The Lies of the Land, I decided to give it a quick read. 

I’ve only managed the first part of the book, but it already has helped me make a connection that I missed. Conn makes the obvious connection between the Cold War and the work of the Army Corps of Engineers around rivers. He explains how the USACE’s approach to managing water — and rationalizing water flows — in the US had many parallels with wartime infrastructure projects. This included a sense of urgency in construction and a coarser attitude toward the rights of proper owners and traditional land rights. In the case of the Grand Forks flood wall of the 1990s, I suspect the aesthetics of the wall reflects some of the military logic at play in the USACE. Conn’s explicit connection between the militarization of rural areas through various strategic defense initiatives and the Army Corp efforts to control the flow of water was very well done and bodes well for the rest of the book! I’m very pleased to be reading this and its making me think more about writing something on Grand Forks as a Cold War town.