Writing Wednesday: Revising as Writing

It has been hard to find time to do any writing over the last few weeks and the next month looks even worse. As a result, I’ve turned my hand to revising the chapters that I have already completed for my book project on oil, photography, archaeology, and the Bakken. I’ve been revising part 2 of chapter 2 and folding in some examples from the US. I otherwise tightened up the section and moved it a few inches closer to its final state.

Since I don’t recall whether I ever posted my first draft of this section, it seemed worthwhile to post the revised draft here: 

2.2. Industrial Archaeology and the Archaeology of Extractive Industries

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 (Wurst and Mrozowski 2016; Shackel 2009). At the same time, 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 (Caraher 2024), coal (Mitchell 2011), copper (LeCain 2009), iron (Smil 2016), 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 (GET CITES). 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 help us understand the impact of the extractive industries on the “local scale” (White 2017).

An approach that emphasizes the local scale presents certain challenges when applied to oil. Oil production is often obscured for reasons ranging from the small scale of boreholes to the persistently toxic character of refineries, and the proprietary nature of technologies. Moreover, oil production also operates across a widely dispersed “petroleumscapes” (Hein 2022; Caraher 2024). Hein’s concept of a petroleumscape while not strictly speaking an archaeological, 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 (Orange 2018). 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 relative 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 (Hailey 2009). 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). Archaeologists and historians have documented some sites such as the Teapot Dome oil field in Wyoming owing in part to the role it played in the eponymous early 20th century political scandal (Steely et al. n.d. and Steel, n.d.). Scholars have prepared Historic American Engineer Record reports on sites such as the 1920s and 1930s Conrad Refining Company Oil refinery in Montana’s Pondera oil field (McCormick 2001), numerous pump stations associated with World War II emergency oi pipeline designed to transport oil to east coast terminals (e.g. GET CITES), and unusual well sites (Past & Present Consultants, n.d.). The most famous and expansive effort to document oil production in the US is the massive project to document the remains of late 19th- and early 20th-century Pennsylvania oil boom preserved in the Allegheny National Forest. The use of central power stations to drive pumps across this oil field created nodal networks of wells connected to the power station by above ground metal rods or belts. The adaptation of older technology for drilling water wells and operating large scale mechanical pumps in factory settings left traces of a distinctive infrastructure which was uniquely visible compared to contemporary oil fields (Ross 1996). National Register of Historic Places documentation has usually focused on a single well in a larger oilfield or region whose significance is dictated by a combination of their chronological priority and access to collection networks and processing facilities required to bring its product to market. While these examples of archaeological “grey paper” often situate wells, refineries, offices, and features of oil fields in their broader context, they their focused and descriptive character stops them short of genuinely synthetic analysis. This is usually left to academic archaeologists and historians. For example, R. Scott Baxter’s work at the “Squaw Flats” oil field in California traced the connection of extraction, storage, habitation, and domestic discard in the rugged Piru Mountains of Southern California (Baxter 2002). The study of the dumps associated with the workers housed near this oil field revealed that the workers sought to reconstruct Victorian ideals of home despite their proximity to the din and dirt of a producing oil field. In this way their experiences paralleled those of workers in Type 2 camps in the Bakken who adopted elements of suburban life to their mobile homes, as chapter 3 will discuss more fully.

The industrial archaeology of petroleum production in the US remains underdeveloped and this is largely the case elsewhere in the world as well. Despite this, long standing efforts to document and recognize the significance of oil production as crucial to development of the modern, industrialized world, the distributed character of the process as well as the often rapid and iterative pace of development often leaves only obscure traces in the landscape. The viscosity of oil itself both literally and in terms of the capital and workforce necessary for its extraction, in this case, resists the use of methods that depend upon a kind of fixity necessary to define the object of archeological study.