Two Book Tuesday: Archaeology of Mining and Fragmentary Modernism

I was under the weather all weekend, so instead of writing, I spent some time with a couple book and trying to rest and stave off the beginnings of a cold before a hectic week begins. 

The two books that I read are odd bedfellows: Nora Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, c.1896 – c.1936 (Oxford 2023) and Paul J. White’s The Archaeology of American Mining (University Presses of Florida 2017). Goldschmidt’s book charts the rising interest in fragments among modernist authors and artists as well as among Classicists and archaeologists over the first decades of the 20th century. White’s book does more or less what it says on the box: it surveys the archaeology and history of American mining in the 19th and 20th century. The books overlap, however, in their interest and awareness of fragmentation in how we understand the emerging modern world.

Paul White acknowledges that “It is precisely at this local scale that archaeology is well positioned to make contributions” and this reflects the approach that archaeologists have generally taken to the archaeology of mining and extractive industries. Mines, mining camps, oil fields, refineries, and coke processing plants have received attention from archaeologists, heritage professionals, and been inscribed in the Historic American Engineering Record and the National Register of Historic Places. These places, however, represent fragments of more expansive networks connected via roads, pipelines, and railroads, which in turn serve and support massive distribution networks. Archaeology fragments the world to make it possible to see the regional (or even global) in the local. This approach reifies, to some extent, the very strategies at the core of extractive industries where raw materials, workforce, wealth, and manufactured goods coalesce rapidly at key nodes rapidly to take advantage of material wealth. They can then dissipate every bit as quickly leaving behind infrastructure waiting to be reactivated if the need arises or allowed to decay (depreciate) when it is no longer valuable. 

The process of fragmentation at the core of archaeological knowledge making likewise celebrated the discovery of fragments. In fact, the discovery of fragments whether papyri or sculpture or pottery encouraged the fetishization of the fragment among the early 20th century intellectuals who saw the fragment not as a disjecta membra of some kind of universal understanding, but as typical of the modern condition. Drawing on folks like Walter Benjamin and his fascination with modernity’s ability to produce ruins, modernist poets, writers, and scholars abandoned the Romantic conception of sentimental and nostalgic ruins and replaced it with dissonant bricolage made possible by the readymade. Here industrial ruins became a testament to urgent speed of the modern which produced a continuous supply of archaeological fragments in the contemporary moment. The presence of fragments from antiquity appeared to almost validate their existence in the contemporary.

Goldschmidt’s book is really quite brilliant and drove me back to reading T.S. Eliot, exploring H.D.’s work (especially her scrapbook from her travels in Greece), and even Ezra Pound. Her far ranging arguments had me both appreciation how modernist mise-en-page paralleled the presentation of fragments of papyrus and inscriptions by scholars and an awareness of how powerfully contemporary Eliot and (alas) even Pound feels today. This is all the more so as we stumble our way through the 21st century vacillating wildly between efforts to “flood the zone” and our own hyper-sensitized expectation that every crisis is preventable. We’re not only invariably experiencing a growing sense of fragmentation in our daily lives as our attention is pulled abruptly from one thing to the next, but this fragmentation produces a growing awareness that contemporary strategies of narrative simply no longer work.

As any number of authors and critics have proposed, the very unpredictability of the contemporary experience reflects the unpredictability of the the earth’s climate. It is becoming more and more clear that to even understand the contemporary situation, we have to embrace such an expansive notion of contemporaneity—one that includes centuries of climate change and the persistent instability of late capitalism, for example— that the concept finds itself characterized not by a unifying temporary framework to understand the present, but a shattered heap of temporal fragments. In other words, the fragmentation present in archaeology, in modernist literature, and in our daily lives is consistent with the collapse of the narrative as a way to understand reality.

Our preoccupation with the fragments and our growing appreciation of the discontinuity of every day life emerge from these two books as part of a longer history of extraction — whether through mining or archaeology — and production whether in creative works such as poetry or in the proliferation of manufactured goods of consumer culture. Goldschmidt’s and White’s books, if read together, make a compelling pair for exploring this very trend.