Writing Wednesday: Archaeology, Fragmentation, and Petroleumscapes

The last four or five days has been a kind of blur to me as I struggle to shake off a mid-winter cold. Fortunately, with all the gross stuff going around these days, whatever I have has turned out to be just a cold (albeit a man cold, which as you know is much more serious).

In any event, I continue to pick away at my book project, writing when time and bandwidth allows. As it is currently organized, the book has a section on “industrial archaeology and the archaeology of extractive industries.” This section could be expanded in many different directions. For example, I discuss the differing temporalities present in extractive industries and look ahead to my future sections on fragmentation by considering how archaeology breaks complex networks into fragments. 

Industrial archaeology’s increased focus on the life of workers particularly in extractive industries reminds us that the material, the processes, and the machines that constitute the industrialized world only represent part of the process. The material turn in archaeology, in contrast, has foregrounded the materiality of the industrial age especially as new substances have come to shape human experiences. Scholars have traced the unique affordances of oil, coal, copper, iron, and other materials at the core of heavy and extractive industries. Oil has garnered particular attention owing to its literal and metaphorical viscosity, its ability to store and transport energy, and its wide range of roles in manufacturing from lubrication to combustion and production of plastics and other petrochemical derivatives. While extractive industries have long relied upon expansive and complex networks to distribute the raw material for processing and to supply extraction, White’s book on the archaeology of mining stresses the ability of archaeology to contribute on the “local scale” (White 2017). 

This approach presents certain challenges to producing an archaeology of oil production is that so much of it is obscured or exists as widely dispersed “petroleumscapes” (Hein 2022). Hein’s concept of a petroleumscape while not strictly speaking an archaeological concept, presents a useful way of understanding the physical, technical, economic, political, and even cultural infrastructure necessary for petroleum extraction to produce wealth. For archaeologists, the distributed character offer particular challenges. On the one hand, archaeology’s specializes in geographically narrow, but high resolution windows into the past. On the other hand, the networks that define the global petroleumscape are deliberately obscured as they run under ground or are cordoned off as toxic, dangerous, or proprietary industrial. Industrial archaeology has tended to focus on sites of industrial activity that have fallen out of use. Because of the toxic nature of oil refining, for example, sites associated with oil production tend to remain in use, adapted over time, making it difficult to gain access to the facilities. The very liquidity of oil makes it difficult to isolate in any one place as it moves through complex distribution networks from deep reserves thousands of meters below the surface through trucks, rail cars, ships, and pipelines to collection points, refineries, and retail outlets. The distributed nature of petroleum production, for example, challenges archaeology’s capacity to produce knowledge based on the individual site.

Of course, the archaeology of extractive industries has long faced similar challenges, but the visibility and relatively accessibility of historic mining sites, for example, has allowed archaeologists to document the work and life of miners in the 19th and early 20th century (as well as much earlier contexts). There are clear parallels between life in work camps associated with extractive industries and those constructed to support workers on large scale infrastructure projects. In many cases, these work camps are true to the ephemeral character of camp sites. This mitigates against arguments for the ephemerality of boom time. Indeed, the impact of petroleum ”booms” often echoes for decades across dense networks of infrastructure. Extraction sites, pipelines, rail terminals, gas plants, refineries, as well as distribution points, service stations and other necessary accoutrements associated with petroleum. Most booms leverage the existence of this infrastructure to guide the flow of capital (in its many manifestations) into and out of the region and many of facilities associated with a boom persist for decades after the boom and lay the groundwork for both future booms. Hein’s work, in particular, emphasizes the persistence refinery sites in Rotterdam, Houston, and Philadelphia as a result of the toxicity associated with the refining process and their locations near urban areas, as hubs in expansive rail networks, and as harbors. It is worth noting that the rise of Philadelphia, for example, as a major refining center coincided with the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania in the decade after the Civil War and many of these refining sites continue to function today nearly 150 years after the Pennsylvania ceased to produce any significant quantities of commercially viable petroleum (Hein 2021: 22-28). In a Bakken example efforts to clean up the massive terrestrial oil spill in 2013 near Tioga revealed at least two capped wells from earlier booms that did not appear on any maps.  

The tension between the persistence of petroleum infrastructure and the seeming ephemerality of oil booms challenges our understanding of concepts such as the historical, modern, modern, and the contemporary. The scars and infrastructure of petroleum production often elide seamlessly with the bustle of contemporary extraction, transportation, and production make it difficult to conduct traditional industrial archaeology with its focus on abandoned sites. In fact, the number of petroleum related sites documented through archaeological practices is remarkably small (Caraher 2024 for a survey). Sites named to the National Register of Historic Places in the United States, for example, are often monuments representing a single well in a larger oilfield or region whose significance is dictated by a combination of their priority and role in the networks required to bring its product to market. As a result, the attention directed toward these sites stake claims neither to their representative character nor to their particular significance within a larger productive landscape.