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INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY
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INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY Marilyn Palmer, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary historical archaeology The archaeology of the period after c. AD 1450 in the Old World, and of the period after European contact in the New World, up to and including the present. industrial archaeology A multidisciplinary approach to the study, interpretation and in selected cases, preservation of the technological, economic, and social evidence for the period of industrialization from c. 1750 to the present day. post-medieval archaeology the archaeology of Europe, particularly the UK, between the end of the Middle Ages and the mid-eighteenth century (c. AD 1450–1750).
Introduction The archaeological study of the physical evidence of recent industrial activity has been one of the most important developments in archaeology, at least in Britain, in the second half of the twentieth century. Industrial archaeology has been transformed from a fringe activity in the 1950s to an internationally recognized element of the discipline of archaeology, demonstrated by the large number of cultural landscapes designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO which have industrial activity at their heart (Figure 1). In this, however, lies the dichotomy of industrial archaeology – it is both an academic study of the ways in which people lived and worked in the past through the physical remains which survive into the present and at the same time a conservation movement to protect and interpret those remains (see World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws). Obviously, the two aspects come together: it is impossible to interpret industrial monuments unless they are understood through archaeological and historical study. But the popular and even the professional conception of industrial archaeology has tended to adopt its meaning as a movement to conserve the industrial past, which would be better termed ‘industrial heritage’, rather than its meaning as the study of the ways people worked in the past. This has hindered its acceptance at the academic level and it is only in the last two decades (1990s–2000s) that it has made considerable headway in this direction. Nevertheless, the emphasis on conservation and preservation of sites currently distinguishes industrial archaeology from both postmedieval and historical archaeology, and has led to a greater retention of volunteer interest, reflected in the contrasting nature of the membership of the two
major British societies concerned with the study of the recent past, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (SPMA) and the Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA). The latter was set up in 1973 to represent the interests of industrial archaeology. It still attempts to hold a balance between the volunteers, who have dominated industrial archaeology in the past, and the professionals, who are playing an increasingly important role. However, volunteers still account for the majority of labor at working sites. In 1998, English Heritage undertook research to quantify volunteer effort in industrial heritage activity in the UK, and their report (Public Access to England’s Industrial Heritage) concluded that there was a total volunteer workforce of some 11 600 participating in the preservation and operation of industrial heritage sites in England, amounting to some £5.8 million pounds in value. The AIA publishes the premier British journal in the field, Industrial Archaeology Review. In the USA, too, a similar contrast exists between the membership and publications of the Society for Historical Archaeology and the Society for Industrial Archaeology, the latter being founded in 1971 and from 1975 publishing Industrial Archeology, edited by Patrick Martin of Michigan Technological University. In 1983, the journal World Archaeology devoted a volume to industrial archaeology (vol. 15. no. 2, 1983). In his overall survey of world industrial archaeology, the economic historian Walter Minchinton said that industrial archaeology had been one of the more successful British postwar exports but that he hoped that a similar survey in 10 years time would be able to report on a more extensive geographical activity, a widened topical scope and a greater professionalism in industrial archaeology throughout the world. More than 20 years on, this article takes up this challenge. It first considers the genesis and significance of these two meanings of industrial archaeology in a section on ‘Origins, definitions, and scope’. A second section considers the subject matter of the discipline, while a final section deals with the changes brought about by the dramatic development of contract archaeology in the 1990s and the need for research strategies to help eliminate the fragmentation created by such an approach.
Origins, Definitions, and Scope Industrial archaeology originated in Britain in the 1950s, after the postwar preoccupation with renewal had led to the destruction of much of the landscape
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Figure 1 The Iron Bridge across the Severn Gorge in Shropshire, the world’s first iron bridge, cast in Abraham Darby’s Coalbrookdale foundry in 1777 and erected in 1779. Now in the care of English Heritage, the bridge was originally saved by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and is the centerpiece of an industrial landscape accorded World Heritage status.
associated with early industrialization. It is generally agreed that the term was first used in print by Michael Rix of the University of Birmingham Extra-mural Department in an article in The Amateur Historian, one of a sequence of articles dealing with various periods of archaeology. The banner was taken up in the UK by Kenneth Hudson in his Industrial Archaeology: an Introduction (John Baker, 1963), J. M. Pannell’s The Techniques of Industrial Archaeology (David and Charles, 1966), and Angus Buchanan in the Pelican Industrial Archaeology in Britain (1972). Industrial Archaeology and Historical Archaeology
In the 1950s, there was no systematic investigation of the physical remains of the recent industrial past in the UK, since the peculiarly British ‘postmedieval archaeology’ generally concerned itself with the period from c. 1450 to c. 1750. The term ‘historical archaeology’ was not generally used in the UK until comparatively recently, even when it became current in the USA and Australia from the 1970s. This is partly because the written history of Europe goes back into classical times and ‘historical archaeology’ could be used to refer to any period where texts and physical evidence can be used in conjunction, for example, as in the Greek and Roman periods. Industrial archaeology was therefore an appropriate term for the study of the classic period of industrialization from c. 1750 onwards. Some early practitioners of industrial archaeology, however, argued that the discipline was a thematic rather than a chronological one and could range from the prehistoric to the modern
period, notably Arthur Raistrick in his Industrial Archaeology: an Historical Survey (Eyre Methuen, 1972). It is now generally accepted that industrial archaeology is the systematic study of standing, as well as subsurface, structures of the classic period of industrialization from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. What characterizes this period is capital investment on a large scale in both buildings and machinery and the consequent organization of the labor force to maximize production. It is with this development that industrial archaeology is largely concerned, although it must be recognized firstly that ‘industrialization’, in this sense, began earlier in some industries than others and that therefore an interpretation of a particular site or industry may need to go back to the seventeenth century or earlier. Secondly, it is clear that the domestic or home-based method of production continued to coexist with factory production, albeit with many changes in the lifestyle of the workforce. The purpose of industrial archaeology, then, is to make use of a multidisciplinary approach, involving site and building survey, photography, stratigraphy, artifacts, landscapes, documentary research, and oral history to study, interpret, and, in some cases, preserve the physical evidence of the vast social and economic changes which have overtaken society in the past 250 years or so. It is generally concerned with the evidence for people at work and so defines a type of human activity rather than a type of site, since ‘work’, even after the so-called Industrial Revolution, could be based in domestic as well as nondomestic locations.
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In areas of the world with a shorter written history, historical archaeology was taken to embrace the study of industrial sites and artifacts. It was pointed out by Ian Jack and Judy Birmingham in Australian Pioneer Technology: Sites and Relics (1979) that the use of the term ‘industrial archaeology’ in Australia was inappropriate since the time span of British industrial archaeology embraced the whole of Australian history since European settlement. In the USA, many historical archaeologists also did not see the need for a different term for the study of industrial sites, since again the majority of their work was concerned with the colonial era and its implications. This point was put forward vehemently in a paper by Vincent Foley in an early (1968) issue of Historical Archaeology (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline). He argued that ‘‘the archaeologist must dig for his data. The ‘industrial archaeologist’ is performing archaeology when he excavates a site. He is not an archaeologist, however, if this excavation is only occasional or accidental to his normal method of procuring data.’’ Foley was strongly opposed by a fellow American, Robert Vogel (who went on to play a major role in American industrial archaeology), who argued in the subsequent issue of Historical Archaeology that it was equally important to record, understand, and interpret aboveground structures, taking as an example the ruinous structures of the Tredegar ironworks in Richmond, Virginia, a bastion of Confederate ordnance production. Donald Hardesty, in his classic The Archaeology of Mining and Miners: A View from the Silver State (SHA, 1988), pointed out that so often the standing buildings, machinery, and landscape features characteristic of many British industrial sites did not survive on US mining sites but ‘‘they are rich in trash dumps, residential house foundations, privies and other remains of the miners themselves’’ and that therefore excavation was essential. In the UK, though, aboveground remains undoubtedly formed the basis of most British industrial archaeology in the first 30 years of its existence as a discipline and the material culture of the workforce, which might have been obtained through systematic excavation, was neglected. The secondary role of excavation in industrial archaeology undoubtedly hindered its acceptance as a legitimate form of archaeology for several decades but – at least in Europe – this is now less of a problem since nondestructive activities such as landscape and earthwork survey and building analysis have become fully accepted aspects of archaeological work. More serious, though, was the fact that industrial archaeology concentrated on the technological analysis of specific industrial sites and areas and failed to consider the behavioral aspects of material culture or the processes of culture change. This justifiable
criticism has only begun to be remedied in the 1990s and 2000s, when the advent of ‘interpretive’ or ‘postprocessual’ approaches led to increasing concern with questions of power and inequality, labor relations, and class formation which are central research themes for industrial archaeology, as in Paul Shackel’s 1996 Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. This development clearly brought industrial archaeology into a much closer relationship with existing subdiscipline of historical archaeology, as already practiced in North America, and Australasia. Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Heritage
The initial impetus for industrial archaeology in the UK was, then, the attempt to study, catalog, and preserve selected relics of the period when Britain was the world leader in the process of industrialization. It was a spontaneous growth, resulting in volunteer activity on a considerable scale in both preservation and recording. The Council for British Archaeology, which represents both amateurs and professionals, tried to give some shape to the enthusiasm for industrial archaeology by the introduction of standardized record cards, completed by volunteers. This grew into the National Record of Industrial Monuments based first at the University of Bath under Angus Buchanan and later subsumed into the National Monuments Record (NMR) of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME). Gazetteers of important industrial sites were built up on a county basis, many of which have found their way into local Sites and Monuments Records (now Historic Environment Records) and achieved a measure of recognition, if not always protection. English Heritage in the 1990s sought to take this activity to a national level by means of the Industrial Monuments Protection Programme, initially designed to update the lists of Ancient Monuments but resulting in some fundamental research on specific industries, especially in the extractive industries where landscape change threatened many sites. Unfortunately, the funding for this project was brought to an end prematurely in 2005 and the large amount of information gathered not adequately disseminated. Similar national recording programs of industrial sites have been carried out in other parts of the UK, especially in Northern Ireland where the government funded an official survey following a pilot study of County Down which had been carried out by E. R. R. Green in the late 1950s (Green was also to edit the first major series of regional industrial archaeology guides in the UK published by David and Charles). W. D. McCutcheon carried out this survey in the 1960s but his important The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland was not published until 1980 (Figure 2). Similar
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Figure 2 Wellbrook Beetling mill in Northern Ireland, a small water-powered mill for beetling or refining woven linen cloth, now in the possession of The National Trust.
work was carried out on the threatened coal industry by the statutory organizations in England, Scotland, and Wales while Stephen Hughes’ magisterial study for the Welsh Royal Commission of the threatened landscape of ‘Copperopolis’, the lower Swansea Valley in South Wales, set new standards for the recording of industrial buildings in their cultural context. Colin Rynne of the University of Cork in Ireland, who has carried out some important recording work and published in 2006, Industrial Ireland 1750–1930: an Archaeology, has pointed out that Ireland was regarded as a colony and that its industrial heritage has also to be thought of as ‘British’, an argument that could be extended into the Caribbean and parts of the eastern USA as well as Australia. Inventory work on industrial sites followed in Europe, generally with more professional and less amateur involvement than in the UK. Although French historians had for a long time been interested in industrial history, little notice was taken of industrial sites until the 1970s and it was not until 1983 that the Inventaire Ge´ne´rale began to include industrial sites with the foundation of an industrial heritage group within it, the Cellule du Patrimoine Industriel. A longterm project to create a national database of French industrial sites was initiated in 1986, and a similar database project was begun in the Netherlands where responsibility for the industrial heritage passed to the Projectbureau Industrieel Erfgoed (PIE), created in 1992. In Belgium, various categories of industrial building have been surveyed, particularly watermills and windmills, and a national survey published by Patrick Viaene in 1986. The Scandinavian countries have an important industrial heritage, particularly in
mining of copper and iron, which is increasingly being recognized as significant by their governments and both R r s in Norway and Falun in Sweden have been designated as World Heritage sites (Figure 3). In Norway, buildings and sites of industrial interest have been recorded both by the Council for Culture and the Norwegian Technical Museum, while in Sweden, motivated by Professor Marie Nisser, the Central Office of National Antiquities is monitoring various recording initiatives. Further afield, industrial archaeology in the heritage sense has made rapid progress in Australia since the 1960s with the Australian National Trust publishing lists of industrial sites and conserving many of them at state level, notably the important mining landscapes of gold, copper, and silver at Moonta and Ballarat. In the United States, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) was created in the 1930s but responsibility for recording industrial buildings and machinery is now shared by the Historical American Engineering Record (HAER), established in 1969 under the aegis of the National Park Service, which itself dates back to 1916. The records are maintained by the Library of Congress in what is termed ‘preservation by documentation’, a concept similar to that of the British National Monuments Records. Preservation itself has undoubtedly played a more major role in industrial archaeology than in other forms of archaeology since its inception and this has, of course, meant that sites are often not excavated below what is felt to be the best level for public appreciation. For example, a steel cementation furnace in Sheffield was excavated to the level at which it had been truncated rather than destroy it to find any
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Figure 3 Copper mining and smelting have dominated the Norwegian town of Røros since its foundation in the late-seventeenth century. Below the slag heaps are the ramshackle wooden workers’ houses with their grassed roofs, while the company town is dominated by the late-eighteenth century Baroque church. Mining continued in Røros well into the twentieth century, but the importance of the town’s historic remains were carefully conserved and accorded World Heritage status in 1982.
Figure 4 One of a row of eight mid-nineteenth century cementation furnaces from the Brightside Works in Sheffield, excavated by ARCUS, the Archaeological Unit of the University of Sheffield (by permission of ARCUS, Sheffield).
possible earlier remains (Figure 4). In Sweden, the medieval iron furnace at Lapphyttan was fully excavated archaeologically to understand more about the origins of blast furnace technology whereas the important standing structures of the iron making complex at Engelsberg, now a World Heritage Site, have been retained as industrial monuments in order to further public understanding of Sweden’s internationally important iron industry. In Poland, recording programs have been carried out on the numerous
surviving headgears associated with the coal industry in the region around Katowice with a view to preserving the most important of these. Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK have cooperated in an important new initiative, the European Route of the Industrial Heritage http://en.erih.net which links sites in all three countries, although the selection of sites is somewhat esoteric. In the USA, the National Parks Service has undertaken the consolidation and in some cases, the complete reconstruction of important
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industrial monuments, such as the early iron making furnaces at Saugus north of Boston and Hopewell in Pennsylvania and the site of Washington’s National Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The involvement of historical archaeologists has led to a greater concentration on the workforce involved at such sites, something that was neglected until recently in British studies, although the work of ARCUS, the Sheffield-based archaeological contract unit, has begun to correct the over-concentration in the UK on technological detail as opposed to the human face of industrial archaeology, (as can be seen in The Historical Archaeology of the Sheffield Cutlery and Tableware Industry 1750–1900, edited in 2002 by James Symonds.). However, the way forward in the large-scale conservation of industrial sites and structures can only be through the process of ‘adaptive reuse’. Many are unsuitable for this technique, although exciting projects for the reuse of nineteenth century steelcased blast furnaces are already in place in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, and in the Landschaftspark near Duisburg in Germany, the former serving as a theater and the latter being used for a variety of recreational purposes, including a climbing wall in the ore store and diving training taking place in one of the now flooded gas holders. However, warehouses, malthouses, and textile mills are increasingly being converted for housing and there have been some spectacular conversions for retail use, such as the former chocolate factory in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. Industrial archaeologists must continue to press for and be involved in adequate archaeological recording of both buildings and their context prior to such conversions; preservation per se needs be selective but preservation by record is essential. Industrial archaeology is then a discipline in tension which seeks to maintain a balance between investigative techniques which can lead to destruction of sites and the preservation of sites and structures for posterity.
The Industrial Past: Buildings, Landscapes, Artifacts, and Documents Buildings
Since industrial archaeology began as a campaign to preserve, or at least to record, selected sites and structures deriving from the industrial past, more attention has been paid to the study of standing buildings than is true for most periods of archaeology. Industrial buildings are the visible symbol of the processes of
production in both space and time, and the analysis of these buildings requires the use of the archaeological concepts of function, context, and typology. The industrial archaeologist has to be able to recognize the buildings characteristic of particular industries in order to determine their function by examining form and topographical context. Typological sequences of structures such as lime, pottery, or brick kilns can help establish relative dates although in many cases the technology used was that deemed appropriate for the purpose: for example, primitive temporary clamps for brick manufacture were built alongside the construction sites of railway tunnels or canal locks in the nineteenth century for speed and convenience even though far more sophisticated methods of production were available. The final stage of the analysis involves the study of the building in its cultural context, attempting to understand its symbolism in terms of power structures and employer–worker relationships within the industry with which it was associated. The volunteer nature of early industrial archaeology meant that most of the fieldwork was site specific, consisting of studies of individual sites and buildings which were published in both regional and local journals. Widespread industrial change toward the end of the twentieth century, however, led to many types of industrial buildings and structures becoming redundant and in danger of demolition without record at the same time. Regional and national surveys were only possible with public funding and an excellent example of such work in the UK are the three volumes on textile mills published in the 1990s by RCHME on West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, and Cheshire, together with extensive recording in the Derwent valley of Derbyshire and yet unpublished work on southwest England (Figure 5). Valuable though these were, little attention was paid to any form of spatial analysis to try to determine how the workforce functioned within them. In this respect, the work of the architectural historian Robert Markus in his 1993 Buildings and Power has been influential in encouraging research students to attempt such analysis, for example, the work of Ian Mellor on various Yorkshire textile mills. In the USA, Mary Beaudry and Stephen Mzrowski have gone further in their multidisciplinary study of the textile town of Lowell in Massachusetts, demonstrating how the form of the settlement expressed the corporate image sought by the entrepreneurs who built the mills, with the female workforce safely ensconced in boarding houses (Figure 6). Patterns of settlement are as important in this period as in earlier periods of history in indicating economic and social organization, and
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Figure 5 A reconstruction drawing of Lombe’s pioneering silk mill at Derby as it may have appeared in 1721. The workforce operated in a space dictated by the circular and transverse silk throwing and twisting machines, which were themselves dependent on the power of the great waterwheel. (RCHME, ã Crown Copyright)
Figure 6 A bird’s eye view of part of Lowell, Massachusetts, by Bailey and Hazah 1876. The Boot Mills are shown between the river and the Eastern Canal, while at right angles to these are the eight rows of boarding houses in which female mill workers were housed.
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much more work is being carried out on domestic housing, one of the earliest studies being Lucy Caffyn’s Workers’ Housing of West Yorkshire (1986). It has also been increasingly recognized that industrial activities persisted on a domestic basis long after the introduction of the factory, and Paul Barnwell, Marilyn Palmer, and Malcolm Airs in 2004 brought together summaries of work being carried out in The Vernacular Workshop, while Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson continued this in their 2005 The Textile Industry of South-west England: a Social Archaeology. Landscape Archaeology
The first use of the term industrial archaeology in print in 1955 coincided with the publication of W. G. Hoskins’ seminal Making of the English Landscape which popularized ‘landscape history’. Hoskins resented the intrusion of large-scale industrialization into the self-sufficient village communities in which he was interested but he did appreciate the potential of industrial archaeology to recreate a particular stage in the development of past society when industry was part of the rural economy. Landscape to both the historian and the archaeologist is the physical manifestation of changes wrought by man in both space and time. Buildings in their relationship to one another and to their topographical setting are part of landscape, and one of the major reasons for studying industrial landscapes is to transform a collection of individual structures into a coherent whole which has meaning in both technological and cultural terms. Technologically, the interrelationship of buildings and features in the landscape is usually determined by sequences of industrial production and the adaptation of these to local environmental conditions. Culturally, these interrelationships can reveal systems of industrial organization and social relationships, particularly those between the employer and his workforce. The task of the industrial archaeologist is to analyze the industrial landscape in terms of both the spatial and the sequential relationships of structures and features in order to illuminate the process of industrialization. Increasing professional activity has begun to reverse the site-specific tendency of early industrial archaeology, and most fieldwork and research programs now reach beyond the structures of prime technological significance to consider their wider context, examining sources of raw materials, provision of power, transport systems, associated industry and accommodation, as in Barry Trinder’s The Making of the Industrial Landscape and Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson’s Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. Studies of industrial landscapes
normally take one of two forms: limited surveys of features associated with a particular site or structure or extensive surveys of whole areas. An outstanding example of the former in the UK is the work carried out by Wayne Cocroft, formerly of RCHME, on the extensive and complex site of the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey in Essex, published in 2000 as Dangerous Energy. This exemplified the problems of determining both spatial and sequential relationships in the landscape, since it included a multiplicity of different buildings and earthworks and had a chronological depth from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the twentieth century. On a broader scale, Judith Alfrey and Kate Clark’s Nuffield-funded survey of the internationally important landscape of the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire in the late 1980s sought to reveal change over time by means of detailed plot surveys making use of both historic maps and the contemporary landscape. Mark Bowden and Ian Goodall of English Heritage undertook an important survey of the Furness district of Cumbria to identify the relationships in the landscape between the surviving iron furnaces, the associated charcoal pitsteads and the sledways and tracks used for transporting the fuel. Considerable archaeological evidence also remained of the related woodland industries, including remnants of the huts occupied by the charcoal-burners and other itinerant woodland workers. Studies such as these are the essence of industrial archaeology, revealing both the spatial links in the landscape and the social context of technological development. Artifacts
To most historical archaeologists, artifacts comprise the main body of evidence from which information about the lifestyles of past societies is derived. Variations in the type and distribution of artifacts indicate material change and prompt investigation into its causes. Industrial archaeologists, however, have chronicled the development of the means of production in terms of changing structures but have paid less attention to the new types of artifacts produced as a result, although David Barker has worked on both the kilns and their products in the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent. This is an obvious area for cooperation between industrial and historical archaeology, since only by bringing the means of production and the products together can changes in material culture be identified and the reasons for change understood. Justine Bayley and Jim Williams of English Heritage have shown in a paper on ‘Archaeological science and industrial archaeology – manufacturing, landscape, and social context’ published in Understanding the Workplace: A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology how scientific techniques can illuminate
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Figure 7 The strong-armed women or balmaidens employed to break up ore at tin and copper mining sites of Cornwall. The role of women in mining is often neglected but they played a major role in preparation and dressing work on the surface while their menfolk extracted ore underground.
most areas of industrial archaeology, from analysis of process residues to studies of the diet and health of the workforce. Such analyses, commonplace in historical archaeology, need to become an equally routine part of industrial archaeology although the cost of such analyses of often beyond the means of those working on industrial sites and structures. Documentary Sources
Both historical and industrial archaeology make routine use of textual evidence. The industrial period is rich in such sources but, since the majority of the workforce was illiterate until at least the end of the nineteenth century, they emanate from the employer rather than the employed. However, with the increasing tendency to give due weight to the human as well as the technological aspects of industrial archaeology, oral histories, photographs, and local collections of memorabilia all have their place in trying to bring the material record back to life (Figure 7). The definition of industrial archaeology used by The International Committee for the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) rightly stresses that the discipline makes use of all methods of investigation most suitable for to increase the understanding of the industrial past and present.
Frameworks For The Future The first half-century of industrial archaeology was, then, largely driven by the need to ensure that buildings and structures from the industrial past which still existed in the contemporary landscape were recognized and, where possible, either recorded or preserved.
Much of the impetus had come from the voluntary sector with increasing professional involvement. The 1990s, however, certainly in the UK and to some extent elsewhere, witnessed a fundamental change in the funding of archaeology. In the UK, this has been expressed as ‘the polluter pays’, much archaeological work no longer being driven by research needs but by rescue priorities in advance of development and funded by the developers themselves. Although this has undoubtedly resulted in a vast increase in the amount of archaeological work undertaken on both sites and buildings, it has also led to profound criticisms that research – or the increase of knowledge and understanding – is no longer the imperative of most archaeological work that is now carried out, largely by contract archaeologists whose numbers have dramatically increased. It was to counter such criticism that English Heritage undertook a program leading to the publication of both regional and national research frameworks into which discoveries made through developer-funded work could be integrated. The regional research frameworks so far published in the UK have sections on both post-Medieval and industrial archaeology, while the AIA, in conjunction with English Heritage, published in 2005 Understanding the Workplace: A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology in Britain, edited by David Gwyn and Marilyn Palmer. This concentrated on the role of human agency in industrial archaeology, the term ‘workplace’ implying not only a building in which work has taken place but also the people who operated within that workplace to carry out the processes. It is not a comprehensive agenda, omitting many themes
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such as landscape characterization, the extractive industries, and the analysis of artifacts, and needs to be read alongside David Barker and David Cranstone’s 2004 edited volume, The Archaeology of Industrialization, which emanated from a conference jointly organized between the Association for Industrial Archaeology and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology at Bristol in 1998. The increasing involvement of professional archaeologists in industrial archaeology has also led to some useful developments in methodology, none more so than that devised by Michael Nevell and John Walker of Manchester University Archaeological Unit. They plotted when new types of industrial site first appeared in the landscape and then ascribed their introduction to one of the three social classes identified in the region, lords, freeholders, and tenants. This Manchester Methodology may not be applicable to areas with a less-defined social structure but resulted in industrial monuments being firmly embedded in the social archaeology of the region rather than just being seen for their technological importance in the development of industrialization. At the same time, industrial archaeology was securing a foothold in academia and Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson put forward in Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice a theoretical approach to industrial archaeology which stressed the role of human agency in site formation. This agenda has been carried forward by contributors to the session of the Theoretical Archaeology Group which was published in 2005 as Industrial Archaeology: New Directions, edited by Eleanor Casella and James Symonds. Both publications stress the need to consider the significance of industrial sites within a framework of inference which seeks to establish social as well as economic and technological significance. Industrial archaeology in the sense of an academic study as opposed to a preservation movement has been moving much closer to historical archaeology as it is now conceived, with the term now becoming more widely used in the UK and perhaps subsuming both post-Medieval and industrial archaeology.
Conclusion Has, in fact, the term ‘industrial archaeology’ now outlived its usefulness? Should it instead be termed ‘later historical archaeology’ or ‘modern historical archaeology’, which defines the discipline as the study of material culture within a textual framework but also gives it a period definition? This would not be a popular solution, however, as Keith Falconer of English Heritage has said,
‘‘just as Britain is perceived to have pioneered the industrial revolution and have bequeathed industrialization to the world two centuries ago, so, in the last half century there is a similar perception that this country has pioneered and given the subject of industrial archaeology to the world.’’
Rather, we may have to continue to operate on two levels: the acceptance of a term such as ‘later historical archaeology’ for the academic study of the archaeology of industrialization, but a continuing popular recognition of ‘industrial archaeology’ as the study and conservation of the monuments of past industrial activity and generally synonymous with ‘industrial heritage’. In this sense, industrial archaeology has been extremely successful in achieving what its pioneers set out to do, achieve recognition for the importance of the remains of the industrial past and where possible their survival in the contemporary landscape. But in the second half of the twentieth century, industrial archaeology has developed from a purely amateur pastime, motivated by a desire to preserve the material remains of Britain’s industrial past, into a more mature scholarly discipline. New studies have contributed toward the development of social approaches to the discipline, while studies of industrial landscapes have explored ways in which these manifest not just the physical remains of industrial processes but also embody evidence for past hierarchical power relations. In these ways, industrial archaeology has broken free of its earlier constraints to become an archaeology of industrialization.
See also: Conservation, Archaeological; Historic Pres-
ervation Laws; Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws.
Further Reading Barker D and Cranstone D (eds.) (2004) Archaeology of Industrialization. Leeds: Maney. Beaudry MC (1989) The Lowell Boott mills complex and its housing: Material expressions of corporate ideology. Historical Archaeology 23: 19–33. Birmingham J, Jack I, and Jeans D (1979) Australian Pioneer Technology: Sites and Relics. Richmond: Heinemann. Buchanan RA (1972) Industrial Archaeology in Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Casella EC and Symonds J (eds.) (2005) Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions. New York: Springer. Cossons N (2000) Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology. London: Science Museum. Gwyn D and Palmer M (2005) Understanding the Workplace; A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology in Britain. Leeds: Maney.
INSECT ANALYSIS 1521 Markus TA (1993) Buildings and Power. London: Routledge. Nevell M (2004) From Farmer to Factory Owner: Models, Methodology, and Industrialisation. Manchester: Tameside Borough Council. Palmer M and Neaverson PA (1984) Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. London: Routledge. Palmer M and Neaverson PA (1999) Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice. London: Routledge. Rynne C (2006) Industrial Ireland 1750–1930: an Archaeology. Cork: The Collins Press. Shackel P (1996) Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. New York: Plenum Press. Stratton M and Trinder B (1997) Industrial England. London: Batsford/English Heritage.
Trinder B (1982) The Making of the Industrial Landscape. London: Dent. Trinder B (ed.) (1992) The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Industrial Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Relevant Websites http://en.erih.net – European Route of Industrial Heritage. www.industial-archaeology.org.uk – Association for Industrial Archaeology. www.sia-web.org – Society for Industrial Archaeology. www.spma.org.uk – Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. www.mnactec.com/TICCIH – International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage. www.sha.org – Society for Historical Archaeology.
INSECT ANALYSIS Scott A Elias, University of London, Egham, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary beetles Any of numerous insects of the order Coleoptera, having biting mouthparts and forewings modified to form horny coverings that protect the underlying pair of membranous hind wings when at rest. Bronze Age The period in history after the Stone Age characterized by the development of bronze and its use, especially for weapons and tools. coprolite Fossilized excrement. faunal remains Bones and other animal parts found in archaeological sites. iron Age A cultural stage characterized by the use of iron as the main metal.
Introduction Well-preserved insect fossils have been found in many archaeological settings. Fossil insects are now making an important contribution to the reconstruction of both natural and anthropogenic environments associated with archaeological sites. These fossils provide evidence about human lifestyles and living conditions, as well as evidence about the environmental setting of the sites. The biological evidence sometimes reveals far more about these matters than can be obtained from archaeological artifacts.
Types of Deposits Yielding Insects Chief among these are waterlogged sediments at sites of human occupation. These are commonly preserved in northern Europe. Insect exoskeletons in waterlogged sediments show excellent preservation, and
their abundance and taxonomic diversity is often incredibly rich (faunal assemblages including hundreds of identified species are not uncommon). Insect exoskeletons are readily preserved in situations where normal decomposition is retarded, due to the lack of oxygen. Examples of saturated organic deposits yielding insect fossils include ancient trackways through bogs and other wetlands, organic detritus from wells, and ancient occupation horizons below the current water table. Organic-rich sediments from ponds, lakes, and peat bogs in close proximity to archaeological sites also may contain insect faunas that are contemporaneous with nearby human occupation. Domestic debris from under floors, in trash middens, latrines, sewers, and barrow pits, have also yielded abundant insect remains. The garbage and sewage of past generations offer many clues to their lifestyles, sanitation, animal husbandry, and land use.
Environmental Indications from Insects The ecological sensitivity of insects makes them useful indicators of past environments, both natural and anthropogenic. Most European archaeological sites contain a mixture of synanthropic (human-associated) and nonsynanthropic insect remains. It is often difficult to make clear separations between these two components. In 1985 Kenward studied indoor and outdoor insect taxa found in modern buildings which helped to define potential sources of insects deposited in ancient dwellings (Figure 1). Insect remains can provide a wealth of archaeological detail and may yield information on human activities and environmental conditions not brought out by other types of data. Stored product pests, as well as scavengers and plant feeders, document food
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY Marilyn Palmer, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary historical archaeology The archaeology of the period after c. AD 1450 in the Old World, and of the period after European contact in the New World, up to and including the present. industrial archaeology A multidisciplinary approach to the study, interpretation and in selected cases, preservation of the technological, economic, and social evidence for the period of industrialization from c. 1750 to the present day. post-medieval archaeology the archaeology of Europe, particularly the UK, between the end of the Middle Ages and the mid-eighteenth century (c. AD 1450–1750).
Introduction The archaeological study of the physical evidence of recent industrial activity has been one of the most important developments in archaeology, at least in Britain, in the second half of the twentieth century. Industrial archaeology has been transformed from a fringe activity in the 1950s to an internationally recognized element of the discipline of archaeology, demonstrated by the large number of cultural landscapes designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO which have industrial activity at their heart (Figure 1). In this, however, lies the dichotomy of industrial archaeology – it is both an academic study of the ways in which people lived and worked in the past through the physical remains which survive into the present and at the same time a conservation movement to protect and interpret those remains (see World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws). Obviously, the two aspects come together: it is impossible to interpret industrial monuments unless they are understood through archaeological and historical study. But the popular and even the professional conception of industrial archaeology has tended to adopt its meaning as a movement to conserve the industrial past, which would be better termed ‘industrial heritage’, rather than its meaning as the study of the ways people worked in the past. This has hindered its acceptance at the academic level and it is only in the last two decades (1990s–2000s) that it has made considerable headway in this direction. Nevertheless, the emphasis on conservation and preservation of sites currently distinguishes industrial archaeology from both postmedieval and historical archaeology, and has led to a greater retention of volunteer interest, reflected in the contrasting nature of the membership of the two
major British societies concerned with the study of the recent past, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (SPMA) and the Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA). The latter was set up in 1973 to represent the interests of industrial archaeology. It still attempts to hold a balance between the volunteers, who have dominated industrial archaeology in the past, and the professionals, who are playing an increasingly important role. However, volunteers still account for the majority of labor at working sites. In 1998, English Heritage undertook research to quantify volunteer effort in industrial heritage activity in the UK, and their report (Public Access to England’s Industrial Heritage) concluded that there was a total volunteer workforce of some 11 600 participating in the preservation and operation of industrial heritage sites in England, amounting to some £5.8 million pounds in value. The AIA publishes the premier British journal in the field, Industrial Archaeology Review. In the USA, too, a similar contrast exists between the membership and publications of the Society for Historical Archaeology and the Society for Industrial Archaeology, the latter being founded in 1971 and from 1975 publishing Industrial Archeology, edited by Patrick Martin of Michigan Technological University. In 1983, the journal World Archaeology devoted a volume to industrial archaeology (vol. 15. no. 2, 1983). In his overall survey of world industrial archaeology, the economic historian Walter Minchinton said that industrial archaeology had been one of the more successful British postwar exports but that he hoped that a similar survey in 10 years time would be able to report on a more extensive geographical activity, a widened topical scope and a greater professionalism in industrial archaeology throughout the world. More than 20 years on, this article takes up this challenge. It first considers the genesis and significance of these two meanings of industrial archaeology in a section on ‘Origins, definitions, and scope’. A second section considers the subject matter of the discipline, while a final section deals with the changes brought about by the dramatic development of contract archaeology in the 1990s and the need for research strategies to help eliminate the fragmentation created by such an approach.
Origins, Definitions, and Scope Industrial archaeology originated in Britain in the 1950s, after the postwar preoccupation with renewal had led to the destruction of much of the landscape
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Figure 1 The Iron Bridge across the Severn Gorge in Shropshire, the world’s first iron bridge, cast in Abraham Darby’s Coalbrookdale foundry in 1777 and erected in 1779. Now in the care of English Heritage, the bridge was originally saved by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and is the centerpiece of an industrial landscape accorded World Heritage status.
associated with early industrialization. It is generally agreed that the term was first used in print by Michael Rix of the University of Birmingham Extra-mural Department in an article in The Amateur Historian, one of a sequence of articles dealing with various periods of archaeology. The banner was taken up in the UK by Kenneth Hudson in his Industrial Archaeology: an Introduction (John Baker, 1963), J. M. Pannell’s The Techniques of Industrial Archaeology (David and Charles, 1966), and Angus Buchanan in the Pelican Industrial Archaeology in Britain (1972). Industrial Archaeology and Historical Archaeology
In the 1950s, there was no systematic investigation of the physical remains of the recent industrial past in the UK, since the peculiarly British ‘postmedieval archaeology’ generally concerned itself with the period from c. 1450 to c. 1750. The term ‘historical archaeology’ was not generally used in the UK until comparatively recently, even when it became current in the USA and Australia from the 1970s. This is partly because the written history of Europe goes back into classical times and ‘historical archaeology’ could be used to refer to any period where texts and physical evidence can be used in conjunction, for example, as in the Greek and Roman periods. Industrial archaeology was therefore an appropriate term for the study of the classic period of industrialization from c. 1750 onwards. Some early practitioners of industrial archaeology, however, argued that the discipline was a thematic rather than a chronological one and could range from the prehistoric to the modern
period, notably Arthur Raistrick in his Industrial Archaeology: an Historical Survey (Eyre Methuen, 1972). It is now generally accepted that industrial archaeology is the systematic study of standing, as well as subsurface, structures of the classic period of industrialization from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. What characterizes this period is capital investment on a large scale in both buildings and machinery and the consequent organization of the labor force to maximize production. It is with this development that industrial archaeology is largely concerned, although it must be recognized firstly that ‘industrialization’, in this sense, began earlier in some industries than others and that therefore an interpretation of a particular site or industry may need to go back to the seventeenth century or earlier. Secondly, it is clear that the domestic or home-based method of production continued to coexist with factory production, albeit with many changes in the lifestyle of the workforce. The purpose of industrial archaeology, then, is to make use of a multidisciplinary approach, involving site and building survey, photography, stratigraphy, artifacts, landscapes, documentary research, and oral history to study, interpret, and, in some cases, preserve the physical evidence of the vast social and economic changes which have overtaken society in the past 250 years or so. It is generally concerned with the evidence for people at work and so defines a type of human activity rather than a type of site, since ‘work’, even after the so-called Industrial Revolution, could be based in domestic as well as nondomestic locations.
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In areas of the world with a shorter written history, historical archaeology was taken to embrace the study of industrial sites and artifacts. It was pointed out by Ian Jack and Judy Birmingham in Australian Pioneer Technology: Sites and Relics (1979) that the use of the term ‘industrial archaeology’ in Australia was inappropriate since the time span of British industrial archaeology embraced the whole of Australian history since European settlement. In the USA, many historical archaeologists also did not see the need for a different term for the study of industrial sites, since again the majority of their work was concerned with the colonial era and its implications. This point was put forward vehemently in a paper by Vincent Foley in an early (1968) issue of Historical Archaeology (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline). He argued that ‘‘the archaeologist must dig for his data. The ‘industrial archaeologist’ is performing archaeology when he excavates a site. He is not an archaeologist, however, if this excavation is only occasional or accidental to his normal method of procuring data.’’ Foley was strongly opposed by a fellow American, Robert Vogel (who went on to play a major role in American industrial archaeology), who argued in the subsequent issue of Historical Archaeology that it was equally important to record, understand, and interpret aboveground structures, taking as an example the ruinous structures of the Tredegar ironworks in Richmond, Virginia, a bastion of Confederate ordnance production. Donald Hardesty, in his classic The Archaeology of Mining and Miners: A View from the Silver State (SHA, 1988), pointed out that so often the standing buildings, machinery, and landscape features characteristic of many British industrial sites did not survive on US mining sites but ‘‘they are rich in trash dumps, residential house foundations, privies and other remains of the miners themselves’’ and that therefore excavation was essential. In the UK, though, aboveground remains undoubtedly formed the basis of most British industrial archaeology in the first 30 years of its existence as a discipline and the material culture of the workforce, which might have been obtained through systematic excavation, was neglected. The secondary role of excavation in industrial archaeology undoubtedly hindered its acceptance as a legitimate form of archaeology for several decades but – at least in Europe – this is now less of a problem since nondestructive activities such as landscape and earthwork survey and building analysis have become fully accepted aspects of archaeological work. More serious, though, was the fact that industrial archaeology concentrated on the technological analysis of specific industrial sites and areas and failed to consider the behavioral aspects of material culture or the processes of culture change. This justifiable
criticism has only begun to be remedied in the 1990s and 2000s, when the advent of ‘interpretive’ or ‘postprocessual’ approaches led to increasing concern with questions of power and inequality, labor relations, and class formation which are central research themes for industrial archaeology, as in Paul Shackel’s 1996 Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. This development clearly brought industrial archaeology into a much closer relationship with existing subdiscipline of historical archaeology, as already practiced in North America, and Australasia. Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Heritage
The initial impetus for industrial archaeology in the UK was, then, the attempt to study, catalog, and preserve selected relics of the period when Britain was the world leader in the process of industrialization. It was a spontaneous growth, resulting in volunteer activity on a considerable scale in both preservation and recording. The Council for British Archaeology, which represents both amateurs and professionals, tried to give some shape to the enthusiasm for industrial archaeology by the introduction of standardized record cards, completed by volunteers. This grew into the National Record of Industrial Monuments based first at the University of Bath under Angus Buchanan and later subsumed into the National Monuments Record (NMR) of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME). Gazetteers of important industrial sites were built up on a county basis, many of which have found their way into local Sites and Monuments Records (now Historic Environment Records) and achieved a measure of recognition, if not always protection. English Heritage in the 1990s sought to take this activity to a national level by means of the Industrial Monuments Protection Programme, initially designed to update the lists of Ancient Monuments but resulting in some fundamental research on specific industries, especially in the extractive industries where landscape change threatened many sites. Unfortunately, the funding for this project was brought to an end prematurely in 2005 and the large amount of information gathered not adequately disseminated. Similar national recording programs of industrial sites have been carried out in other parts of the UK, especially in Northern Ireland where the government funded an official survey following a pilot study of County Down which had been carried out by E. R. R. Green in the late 1950s (Green was also to edit the first major series of regional industrial archaeology guides in the UK published by David and Charles). W. D. McCutcheon carried out this survey in the 1960s but his important The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland was not published until 1980 (Figure 2). Similar
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Figure 2 Wellbrook Beetling mill in Northern Ireland, a small water-powered mill for beetling or refining woven linen cloth, now in the possession of The National Trust.
work was carried out on the threatened coal industry by the statutory organizations in England, Scotland, and Wales while Stephen Hughes’ magisterial study for the Welsh Royal Commission of the threatened landscape of ‘Copperopolis’, the lower Swansea Valley in South Wales, set new standards for the recording of industrial buildings in their cultural context. Colin Rynne of the University of Cork in Ireland, who has carried out some important recording work and published in 2006, Industrial Ireland 1750–1930: an Archaeology, has pointed out that Ireland was regarded as a colony and that its industrial heritage has also to be thought of as ‘British’, an argument that could be extended into the Caribbean and parts of the eastern USA as well as Australia. Inventory work on industrial sites followed in Europe, generally with more professional and less amateur involvement than in the UK. Although French historians had for a long time been interested in industrial history, little notice was taken of industrial sites until the 1970s and it was not until 1983 that the Inventaire Ge´ne´rale began to include industrial sites with the foundation of an industrial heritage group within it, the Cellule du Patrimoine Industriel. A longterm project to create a national database of French industrial sites was initiated in 1986, and a similar database project was begun in the Netherlands where responsibility for the industrial heritage passed to the Projectbureau Industrieel Erfgoed (PIE), created in 1992. In Belgium, various categories of industrial building have been surveyed, particularly watermills and windmills, and a national survey published by Patrick Viaene in 1986. The Scandinavian countries have an important industrial heritage, particularly in
mining of copper and iron, which is increasingly being recognized as significant by their governments and both R r s in Norway and Falun in Sweden have been designated as World Heritage sites (Figure 3). In Norway, buildings and sites of industrial interest have been recorded both by the Council for Culture and the Norwegian Technical Museum, while in Sweden, motivated by Professor Marie Nisser, the Central Office of National Antiquities is monitoring various recording initiatives. Further afield, industrial archaeology in the heritage sense has made rapid progress in Australia since the 1960s with the Australian National Trust publishing lists of industrial sites and conserving many of them at state level, notably the important mining landscapes of gold, copper, and silver at Moonta and Ballarat. In the United States, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) was created in the 1930s but responsibility for recording industrial buildings and machinery is now shared by the Historical American Engineering Record (HAER), established in 1969 under the aegis of the National Park Service, which itself dates back to 1916. The records are maintained by the Library of Congress in what is termed ‘preservation by documentation’, a concept similar to that of the British National Monuments Records. Preservation itself has undoubtedly played a more major role in industrial archaeology than in other forms of archaeology since its inception and this has, of course, meant that sites are often not excavated below what is felt to be the best level for public appreciation. For example, a steel cementation furnace in Sheffield was excavated to the level at which it had been truncated rather than destroy it to find any
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Figure 3 Copper mining and smelting have dominated the Norwegian town of Røros since its foundation in the late-seventeenth century. Below the slag heaps are the ramshackle wooden workers’ houses with their grassed roofs, while the company town is dominated by the late-eighteenth century Baroque church. Mining continued in Røros well into the twentieth century, but the importance of the town’s historic remains were carefully conserved and accorded World Heritage status in 1982.
Figure 4 One of a row of eight mid-nineteenth century cementation furnaces from the Brightside Works in Sheffield, excavated by ARCUS, the Archaeological Unit of the University of Sheffield (by permission of ARCUS, Sheffield).
possible earlier remains (Figure 4). In Sweden, the medieval iron furnace at Lapphyttan was fully excavated archaeologically to understand more about the origins of blast furnace technology whereas the important standing structures of the iron making complex at Engelsberg, now a World Heritage Site, have been retained as industrial monuments in order to further public understanding of Sweden’s internationally important iron industry. In Poland, recording programs have been carried out on the numerous
surviving headgears associated with the coal industry in the region around Katowice with a view to preserving the most important of these. Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK have cooperated in an important new initiative, the European Route of the Industrial Heritage http://en.erih.net which links sites in all three countries, although the selection of sites is somewhat esoteric. In the USA, the National Parks Service has undertaken the consolidation and in some cases, the complete reconstruction of important
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industrial monuments, such as the early iron making furnaces at Saugus north of Boston and Hopewell in Pennsylvania and the site of Washington’s National Armory and Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia. The involvement of historical archaeologists has led to a greater concentration on the workforce involved at such sites, something that was neglected until recently in British studies, although the work of ARCUS, the Sheffield-based archaeological contract unit, has begun to correct the over-concentration in the UK on technological detail as opposed to the human face of industrial archaeology, (as can be seen in The Historical Archaeology of the Sheffield Cutlery and Tableware Industry 1750–1900, edited in 2002 by James Symonds.). However, the way forward in the large-scale conservation of industrial sites and structures can only be through the process of ‘adaptive reuse’. Many are unsuitable for this technique, although exciting projects for the reuse of nineteenth century steelcased blast furnaces are already in place in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, and in the Landschaftspark near Duisburg in Germany, the former serving as a theater and the latter being used for a variety of recreational purposes, including a climbing wall in the ore store and diving training taking place in one of the now flooded gas holders. However, warehouses, malthouses, and textile mills are increasingly being converted for housing and there have been some spectacular conversions for retail use, such as the former chocolate factory in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. Industrial archaeologists must continue to press for and be involved in adequate archaeological recording of both buildings and their context prior to such conversions; preservation per se needs be selective but preservation by record is essential. Industrial archaeology is then a discipline in tension which seeks to maintain a balance between investigative techniques which can lead to destruction of sites and the preservation of sites and structures for posterity.
The Industrial Past: Buildings, Landscapes, Artifacts, and Documents Buildings
Since industrial archaeology began as a campaign to preserve, or at least to record, selected sites and structures deriving from the industrial past, more attention has been paid to the study of standing buildings than is true for most periods of archaeology. Industrial buildings are the visible symbol of the processes of
production in both space and time, and the analysis of these buildings requires the use of the archaeological concepts of function, context, and typology. The industrial archaeologist has to be able to recognize the buildings characteristic of particular industries in order to determine their function by examining form and topographical context. Typological sequences of structures such as lime, pottery, or brick kilns can help establish relative dates although in many cases the technology used was that deemed appropriate for the purpose: for example, primitive temporary clamps for brick manufacture were built alongside the construction sites of railway tunnels or canal locks in the nineteenth century for speed and convenience even though far more sophisticated methods of production were available. The final stage of the analysis involves the study of the building in its cultural context, attempting to understand its symbolism in terms of power structures and employer–worker relationships within the industry with which it was associated. The volunteer nature of early industrial archaeology meant that most of the fieldwork was site specific, consisting of studies of individual sites and buildings which were published in both regional and local journals. Widespread industrial change toward the end of the twentieth century, however, led to many types of industrial buildings and structures becoming redundant and in danger of demolition without record at the same time. Regional and national surveys were only possible with public funding and an excellent example of such work in the UK are the three volumes on textile mills published in the 1990s by RCHME on West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, and Cheshire, together with extensive recording in the Derwent valley of Derbyshire and yet unpublished work on southwest England (Figure 5). Valuable though these were, little attention was paid to any form of spatial analysis to try to determine how the workforce functioned within them. In this respect, the work of the architectural historian Robert Markus in his 1993 Buildings and Power has been influential in encouraging research students to attempt such analysis, for example, the work of Ian Mellor on various Yorkshire textile mills. In the USA, Mary Beaudry and Stephen Mzrowski have gone further in their multidisciplinary study of the textile town of Lowell in Massachusetts, demonstrating how the form of the settlement expressed the corporate image sought by the entrepreneurs who built the mills, with the female workforce safely ensconced in boarding houses (Figure 6). Patterns of settlement are as important in this period as in earlier periods of history in indicating economic and social organization, and
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Figure 5 A reconstruction drawing of Lombe’s pioneering silk mill at Derby as it may have appeared in 1721. The workforce operated in a space dictated by the circular and transverse silk throwing and twisting machines, which were themselves dependent on the power of the great waterwheel. (RCHME, ã Crown Copyright)
Figure 6 A bird’s eye view of part of Lowell, Massachusetts, by Bailey and Hazah 1876. The Boot Mills are shown between the river and the Eastern Canal, while at right angles to these are the eight rows of boarding houses in which female mill workers were housed.
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much more work is being carried out on domestic housing, one of the earliest studies being Lucy Caffyn’s Workers’ Housing of West Yorkshire (1986). It has also been increasingly recognized that industrial activities persisted on a domestic basis long after the introduction of the factory, and Paul Barnwell, Marilyn Palmer, and Malcolm Airs in 2004 brought together summaries of work being carried out in The Vernacular Workshop, while Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson continued this in their 2005 The Textile Industry of South-west England: a Social Archaeology. Landscape Archaeology
The first use of the term industrial archaeology in print in 1955 coincided with the publication of W. G. Hoskins’ seminal Making of the English Landscape which popularized ‘landscape history’. Hoskins resented the intrusion of large-scale industrialization into the self-sufficient village communities in which he was interested but he did appreciate the potential of industrial archaeology to recreate a particular stage in the development of past society when industry was part of the rural economy. Landscape to both the historian and the archaeologist is the physical manifestation of changes wrought by man in both space and time. Buildings in their relationship to one another and to their topographical setting are part of landscape, and one of the major reasons for studying industrial landscapes is to transform a collection of individual structures into a coherent whole which has meaning in both technological and cultural terms. Technologically, the interrelationship of buildings and features in the landscape is usually determined by sequences of industrial production and the adaptation of these to local environmental conditions. Culturally, these interrelationships can reveal systems of industrial organization and social relationships, particularly those between the employer and his workforce. The task of the industrial archaeologist is to analyze the industrial landscape in terms of both the spatial and the sequential relationships of structures and features in order to illuminate the process of industrialization. Increasing professional activity has begun to reverse the site-specific tendency of early industrial archaeology, and most fieldwork and research programs now reach beyond the structures of prime technological significance to consider their wider context, examining sources of raw materials, provision of power, transport systems, associated industry and accommodation, as in Barry Trinder’s The Making of the Industrial Landscape and Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson’s Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. Studies of industrial landscapes
normally take one of two forms: limited surveys of features associated with a particular site or structure or extensive surveys of whole areas. An outstanding example of the former in the UK is the work carried out by Wayne Cocroft, formerly of RCHME, on the extensive and complex site of the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey in Essex, published in 2000 as Dangerous Energy. This exemplified the problems of determining both spatial and sequential relationships in the landscape, since it included a multiplicity of different buildings and earthworks and had a chronological depth from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the twentieth century. On a broader scale, Judith Alfrey and Kate Clark’s Nuffield-funded survey of the internationally important landscape of the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire in the late 1980s sought to reveal change over time by means of detailed plot surveys making use of both historic maps and the contemporary landscape. Mark Bowden and Ian Goodall of English Heritage undertook an important survey of the Furness district of Cumbria to identify the relationships in the landscape between the surviving iron furnaces, the associated charcoal pitsteads and the sledways and tracks used for transporting the fuel. Considerable archaeological evidence also remained of the related woodland industries, including remnants of the huts occupied by the charcoal-burners and other itinerant woodland workers. Studies such as these are the essence of industrial archaeology, revealing both the spatial links in the landscape and the social context of technological development. Artifacts
To most historical archaeologists, artifacts comprise the main body of evidence from which information about the lifestyles of past societies is derived. Variations in the type and distribution of artifacts indicate material change and prompt investigation into its causes. Industrial archaeologists, however, have chronicled the development of the means of production in terms of changing structures but have paid less attention to the new types of artifacts produced as a result, although David Barker has worked on both the kilns and their products in the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent. This is an obvious area for cooperation between industrial and historical archaeology, since only by bringing the means of production and the products together can changes in material culture be identified and the reasons for change understood. Justine Bayley and Jim Williams of English Heritage have shown in a paper on ‘Archaeological science and industrial archaeology – manufacturing, landscape, and social context’ published in Understanding the Workplace: A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology how scientific techniques can illuminate
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Figure 7 The strong-armed women or balmaidens employed to break up ore at tin and copper mining sites of Cornwall. The role of women in mining is often neglected but they played a major role in preparation and dressing work on the surface while their menfolk extracted ore underground.
most areas of industrial archaeology, from analysis of process residues to studies of the diet and health of the workforce. Such analyses, commonplace in historical archaeology, need to become an equally routine part of industrial archaeology although the cost of such analyses of often beyond the means of those working on industrial sites and structures. Documentary Sources
Both historical and industrial archaeology make routine use of textual evidence. The industrial period is rich in such sources but, since the majority of the workforce was illiterate until at least the end of the nineteenth century, they emanate from the employer rather than the employed. However, with the increasing tendency to give due weight to the human as well as the technological aspects of industrial archaeology, oral histories, photographs, and local collections of memorabilia all have their place in trying to bring the material record back to life (Figure 7). The definition of industrial archaeology used by The International Committee for the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) rightly stresses that the discipline makes use of all methods of investigation most suitable for to increase the understanding of the industrial past and present.
Frameworks For The Future The first half-century of industrial archaeology was, then, largely driven by the need to ensure that buildings and structures from the industrial past which still existed in the contemporary landscape were recognized and, where possible, either recorded or preserved.
Much of the impetus had come from the voluntary sector with increasing professional involvement. The 1990s, however, certainly in the UK and to some extent elsewhere, witnessed a fundamental change in the funding of archaeology. In the UK, this has been expressed as ‘the polluter pays’, much archaeological work no longer being driven by research needs but by rescue priorities in advance of development and funded by the developers themselves. Although this has undoubtedly resulted in a vast increase in the amount of archaeological work undertaken on both sites and buildings, it has also led to profound criticisms that research – or the increase of knowledge and understanding – is no longer the imperative of most archaeological work that is now carried out, largely by contract archaeologists whose numbers have dramatically increased. It was to counter such criticism that English Heritage undertook a program leading to the publication of both regional and national research frameworks into which discoveries made through developer-funded work could be integrated. The regional research frameworks so far published in the UK have sections on both post-Medieval and industrial archaeology, while the AIA, in conjunction with English Heritage, published in 2005 Understanding the Workplace: A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology in Britain, edited by David Gwyn and Marilyn Palmer. This concentrated on the role of human agency in industrial archaeology, the term ‘workplace’ implying not only a building in which work has taken place but also the people who operated within that workplace to carry out the processes. It is not a comprehensive agenda, omitting many themes
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such as landscape characterization, the extractive industries, and the analysis of artifacts, and needs to be read alongside David Barker and David Cranstone’s 2004 edited volume, The Archaeology of Industrialization, which emanated from a conference jointly organized between the Association for Industrial Archaeology and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology at Bristol in 1998. The increasing involvement of professional archaeologists in industrial archaeology has also led to some useful developments in methodology, none more so than that devised by Michael Nevell and John Walker of Manchester University Archaeological Unit. They plotted when new types of industrial site first appeared in the landscape and then ascribed their introduction to one of the three social classes identified in the region, lords, freeholders, and tenants. This Manchester Methodology may not be applicable to areas with a less-defined social structure but resulted in industrial monuments being firmly embedded in the social archaeology of the region rather than just being seen for their technological importance in the development of industrialization. At the same time, industrial archaeology was securing a foothold in academia and Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson put forward in Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice a theoretical approach to industrial archaeology which stressed the role of human agency in site formation. This agenda has been carried forward by contributors to the session of the Theoretical Archaeology Group which was published in 2005 as Industrial Archaeology: New Directions, edited by Eleanor Casella and James Symonds. Both publications stress the need to consider the significance of industrial sites within a framework of inference which seeks to establish social as well as economic and technological significance. Industrial archaeology in the sense of an academic study as opposed to a preservation movement has been moving much closer to historical archaeology as it is now conceived, with the term now becoming more widely used in the UK and perhaps subsuming both post-Medieval and industrial archaeology.
Conclusion Has, in fact, the term ‘industrial archaeology’ now outlived its usefulness? Should it instead be termed ‘later historical archaeology’ or ‘modern historical archaeology’, which defines the discipline as the study of material culture within a textual framework but also gives it a period definition? This would not be a popular solution, however, as Keith Falconer of English Heritage has said,
‘‘just as Britain is perceived to have pioneered the industrial revolution and have bequeathed industrialization to the world two centuries ago, so, in the last half century there is a similar perception that this country has pioneered and given the subject of industrial archaeology to the world.’’
Rather, we may have to continue to operate on two levels: the acceptance of a term such as ‘later historical archaeology’ for the academic study of the archaeology of industrialization, but a continuing popular recognition of ‘industrial archaeology’ as the study and conservation of the monuments of past industrial activity and generally synonymous with ‘industrial heritage’. In this sense, industrial archaeology has been extremely successful in achieving what its pioneers set out to do, achieve recognition for the importance of the remains of the industrial past and where possible their survival in the contemporary landscape. But in the second half of the twentieth century, industrial archaeology has developed from a purely amateur pastime, motivated by a desire to preserve the material remains of Britain’s industrial past, into a more mature scholarly discipline. New studies have contributed toward the development of social approaches to the discipline, while studies of industrial landscapes have explored ways in which these manifest not just the physical remains of industrial processes but also embody evidence for past hierarchical power relations. In these ways, industrial archaeology has broken free of its earlier constraints to become an archaeology of industrialization.
See also: Conservation, Archaeological; Historic Pres-
ervation Laws; Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; World Heritage Sites, Types and Laws.
Further Reading Barker D and Cranstone D (eds.) (2004) Archaeology of Industrialization. Leeds: Maney. Beaudry MC (1989) The Lowell Boott mills complex and its housing: Material expressions of corporate ideology. Historical Archaeology 23: 19–33. Birmingham J, Jack I, and Jeans D (1979) Australian Pioneer Technology: Sites and Relics. Richmond: Heinemann. Buchanan RA (1972) Industrial Archaeology in Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Casella EC and Symonds J (eds.) (2005) Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions. New York: Springer. Cossons N (2000) Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology. London: Science Museum. Gwyn D and Palmer M (2005) Understanding the Workplace; A Research Framework for Industrial Archaeology in Britain. Leeds: Maney.
INSECT ANALYSIS 1521 Markus TA (1993) Buildings and Power. London: Routledge. Nevell M (2004) From Farmer to Factory Owner: Models, Methodology, and Industrialisation. Manchester: Tameside Borough Council. Palmer M and Neaverson PA (1984) Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. London: Routledge. Palmer M and Neaverson PA (1999) Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice. London: Routledge. Rynne C (2006) Industrial Ireland 1750–1930: an Archaeology. Cork: The Collins Press. Shackel P (1996) Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era. New York: Plenum Press. Stratton M and Trinder B (1997) Industrial England. London: Batsford/English Heritage.
Trinder B (1982) The Making of the Industrial Landscape. London: Dent. Trinder B (ed.) (1992) The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Industrial Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Relevant Websites http://en.erih.net – European Route of Industrial Heritage. www.industial-archaeology.org.uk – Association for Industrial Archaeology. www.sia-web.org – Society for Industrial Archaeology. www.spma.org.uk – Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology. www.mnactec.com/TICCIH – International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage. www.sha.org – Society for Historical Archaeology.
INSECT ANALYSIS Scott A Elias, University of London, Egham, UK ã 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary beetles Any of numerous insects of the order Coleoptera, having biting mouthparts and forewings modified to form horny coverings that protect the underlying pair of membranous hind wings when at rest. Bronze Age The period in history after the Stone Age characterized by the development of bronze and its use, especially for weapons and tools. coprolite Fossilized excrement. faunal remains Bones and other animal parts found in archaeological sites. iron Age A cultural stage characterized by the use of iron as the main metal.
Introduction Well-preserved insect fossils have been found in many archaeological settings. Fossil insects are now making an important contribution to the reconstruction of both natural and anthropogenic environments associated with archaeological sites. These fossils provide evidence about human lifestyles and living conditions, as well as evidence about the environmental setting of the sites. The biological evidence sometimes reveals far more about these matters than can be obtained from archaeological artifacts.
Types of Deposits Yielding Insects Chief among these are waterlogged sediments at sites of human occupation. These are commonly preserved in northern Europe. Insect exoskeletons in waterlogged sediments show excellent preservation, and
their abundance and taxonomic diversity is often incredibly rich (faunal assemblages including hundreds of identified species are not uncommon). Insect exoskeletons are readily preserved in situations where normal decomposition is retarded, due to the lack of oxygen. Examples of saturated organic deposits yielding insect fossils include ancient trackways through bogs and other wetlands, organic detritus from wells, and ancient occupation horizons below the current water table. Organic-rich sediments from ponds, lakes, and peat bogs in close proximity to archaeological sites also may contain insect faunas that are contemporaneous with nearby human occupation. Domestic debris from under floors, in trash middens, latrines, sewers, and barrow pits, have also yielded abundant insect remains. The garbage and sewage of past generations offer many clues to their lifestyles, sanitation, animal husbandry, and land use.
Environmental Indications from Insects The ecological sensitivity of insects makes them useful indicators of past environments, both natural and anthropogenic. Most European archaeological sites contain a mixture of synanthropic (human-associated) and nonsynanthropic insect remains. It is often difficult to make clear separations between these two components. In 1985 Kenward studied indoor and outdoor insect taxa found in modern buildings which helped to define potential sources of insects deposited in ancient dwellings (Figure 1). Insect remains can provide a wealth of archaeological detail and may yield information on human activities and environmental conditions not brought out by other types of data. Stored product pests, as well as scavengers and plant feeders, document food