Capitalism (Other Keyword)
26-43 (43 Records)
In this paper we examine archaeological data from Blendon Landing, a village centered on logging in Southwest Michigan during the mid-nineteenth century. When the logging ceased, most left. However archaeological and historical analysis suggests that a period of squatting occurred following Blendon Landing’s "abandonment". Squatting, as a ‘mode of existence’ outside the primary relations of capitalism, is often neglected in historical and archaeological research. Life, however, does not end with...
Life Weaving Golden Thread: Archaeological Investigations at the Sampson Mill Village, Greenville County, South Carolina (1993)
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Machines and the Migrant Under-employed: the production of surplus life and labor in the Anthracite coal fields of Northeast Pennsylvania (2018)
For much of its early history, underground coal mining involved material conditions which encouraged the solidarity and control of its independent skilled workers. Coal operations in the Anthracite region of Northeast Pennsylvania were among the first, however, to mechanize labor processes with steam shovels, waste processing, and other technical means to extract additional surplus profit from their investments. It also served to break the resistance of organized skilled workers. This technical...
Men of Good Timber: An Archaeological Investigation of Labor in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2015)
Questions of labor and everyday life have been commonplace in archaeology. At Coalwood, a cordwood camp that operated from 1901-1912 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, these issues become especially important since labor experienced a dramatic transformation when the camp shifted from housing a large number of male laborers to being organized by individual households. In this paper I use archaeological evidence to examine the social relations these laborers were engaged in that produced and...
Mineros del Alto Cielo: Social space and materiality during the capitalist expansion in the north of Chile (Ollagüe, 20th century) (2017)
In Chile, the process of modernization, expressed by the expansion of capitalism and industrialization, had many economic and social impacts. Based on sulphur mining camps located in Ollagüe, a commune of the Antofagasta region, we show the importance of modern materiality associated with the development of mining industries in northern Chile during the 20th century. We consider that the modernization process, the industrial ruins and the materiality of the recent past, have generated memory...
‘A Most Valuable Commerce’: Fur Trade and River Power Near the Mississippi Headwaters (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While the North American Fur Trade has been commonly examined through economic lenses, scholarship from the 1980s onward has strived to demonstrate that this phenomenon was more than mere trade and merchant capitalism: it also embodied a complex web of social relationships and practices that went beyond daily...
Rock Salt Mining in San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile, during the 20th Century: Protoindustrialization or Industrialization in the Periphery? (2015)
Rock salt exploitation in the oases of San Pedro de Atacama is one among many expressions of capitalist expansion in Latin America. Except for mining concessions, historical documentation of these practices is virtually nonexistent, although material remains and former actors in the mining process still survive. In this paper, we present archaeological evidence of rock salt mining sites of different scale and kind of exploitation that coexist throughout the 20th century. Such differences show...
The Role of Health and Wellness Tourism in the Evolution of Labor Regimes in the American South (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In recent years, scholars have linked the rise of modern tourism with broader transformations in American capitalism during the nineteenth century, when the new “scientific” management of labor and capital led to the development of a large, managerial class of laborers within an increasingly service-oriented economy. Early forms of tourism typically centered on the medicinal...
Sea & the City: A Red Star Line Assemblage in Antwerp (Belgium) (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In contrast to what films as Titanic would make believe, scientific knowledge on ocean liners is fairly limited. These boats, and their material culture, however functioned as symbols of modernity par excellence and thus allow a better understanding of the advent of a new world at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. In this paper, an assemblage is presented of ceramics belonging...
The shadow of Mary Beaudry in Antarctic Archeology (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The ideas and proposals of Mary Beaudry have left their mark, on Historical Archaeology and of course on the way we approach the works on the first human occupations, at the beginning of the 19th century, of the Antarctic continent. Groups of marine mammal hunters came to these...
St. Eustatius--The Nexus for Colonial Caribbean Capitalism (2013)
As the nexus for international trade in the Atlantic World during the latter 18th and early 19th centuries, St. Eustatius provided the single largest and most efficient conduit for people, news, correspondence and trade items during this time. The material cultural record in both archaeology and architecture reflect the cosmopolitan society geared toward unfettered capitalism in the first free trading port in modern times. A mix of nationalities, languages and religions found in few places in...
Sulphur Mining in Northern Chile (20th Century): Ghostly Landscapes, Temporal Movement, and the Rhetoric of Nostalgia (2018)
This communication presents an interdisciplinary research project that is carried out in the indigenous community of Ollagüe, in northern Chile. The temporal movement of the industrial materiality associated with the sulphur mining history of the village during the 20th century allows us to ask: could industrial ruins and their materiality engender memory spaces intertwined with the local indigenous community’s contemporary preoccupations? By considering different forms of time representations,...
A Tale of Two Pueblos: Varying Consumption Practices and Market Dependence Within the Margins of the Spanish Colonial Empire in Mexico (2017)
Studies of Spanish colonial capitalism often exclude Mesoamerica or relegate it to a peripheral and dependent role in the emerging global economy. Despite pre-Hispanic antecedents for many capitalist practices, such as market-based circulation and market dependence, the economy that emerged in New Spain is often portrayed as a function of the European economy. In contrast, we follow Pezzarossi in considering how colonial shifts in consumption were informed by pre-Hispanic practices and were not...
Theorizing Capitalism’s Cracks (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Perpetual economic and ecological crises, coupled with Marx’s loss of credibility have left many questioning whether any viable alternative is possible. While historical archaeology has done important work revealing capitalism’s destruction, exploitation and trauma, there is an inherent danger of perpetuating the idea of an...
To Animate the Monster: Public Archaeology of Capitalism (2016)
Metaphors connecting capitalism and the phantasmagorical have always been rampant. References to the ghostly and ghastly point to the contradiction that capitalism is equally pervasive and invisible or, at least, elided. While all aspects of the monstrous have become important narrative tropes in the modern world, we seldom use this same discourse to name capitalism as a monstrous system. And yet, the ghosts are restless; capitalism as a system has created a ‘nightmare world’ where the products...
What Remains: Building Removal, Worker Retraining, and Toxic Materials in Detroit (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines how the destruction of built environments reconfigures economic and environmental inequalities in the postindustrial United States. It does so by investigating the demolition of vacant buildings in Detroit. Estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000, vacant buildings index decades of racially motivated population decline and deindustrialization. Such structures are...
Without regard for persons: The archaeology of american capitalism (2013)
In The Archaoelogy of American Capitalism, I examine a diverse range of studies to make the case that the historical archaeology in the United States is well served by a direct analysis of capitalism as a principle context for production, consumption, and cultural experience in America. Whether looking at the fur trade, the Georgian order, the creation of modern cities and industries or the practices of history-making and archaeology itself, I show how the lust for profit and bourgeois...
You Sleep Alone, Away from People: Understanding the Movement of Hobos and Other Transient Laborers (ca. 1880 – 1940) (2017)
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hobos and other transient workers crisscrossed the nation, taking temporary jobs wherever capital demanded labor that exceeded local resources. Despite their contingent status as surplus laborers, hobos were cast as morally bankrupt deviants, insane, and sexually ambiguous men by media outlets across the nation. State laws and county and town ordinances were summarily passed barring hobos from entering towns, cities, and otherwise populous...