Labor (Other Keyword)
51-75 (107 Records)
This paper begins with an overview of various scholarships of human creativity, with an eye toward archaeological discourses. The author then turns to a contrasting pair of nineteenth-century case studies: pottery manufacture in Utah and milling copper ore in Michigan. These two workplaces, both built and staffed by immigrants, were fundamentally attached to global flows and relations, despite their frontier settings. In one case, factory workers became artisans; while in the other,...
It is Christmas and the House is on Fire: Understanding Labor Relations in Late Nineteenth-Century Baltimore (2017)
On Christmas Day 1877, a fire spread through a block of homes in the small quarry town of Texas in Baltimore County, Maryland. Although the fire destroyed the large stone rowhouse building, the flames also sealed the material record of the lives of a group of laborers and their families at that moment in time. Examining labor relations within the town of Texas and the wider Baltimore area in the latter half of the nineteenth century places these artifacts in context and helps to explain the...
"It Is the Devil’s Business": Acceptable Labor, Clandestine Labor, and Sex Work (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. Slowly, twenty-first century Americans are beginning to accept the reality that sex work is real work. As a component of this, scholars exploring historical sex work in Boston explore this reality within the context of nineteenth century concepts of labor, acceptable versus...
It Takes a Village: Mainland and Channel Islands Population (Labor) Resources through Time (2015)
This presentation traces population estimates of the Chumash peoples on both sides of the Santa Barbara Channel through several thousand years, examining how researchers have arrived at those estimates and where possible suggesting how we might need to adjust both some of our assumptions and some of the outcomes. This review should be useful in further examining other phenomena such as sizes of labor forces available for the intensive Channel Islands specialized craft production industries...
It takes a village: Utilizing a synthesis of old and new data to better understand the patterning of workers’ housing of iron furnaces in western Maryland. (2018)
The large labor force needed to operate an iron furnace in the late 18th and 19th century necessitated the workforce to live close to the industrial complex they operated. Information drawn from the surviving structures at Catoctin Furnace, near Thurmont Maryland, along with primary sources such as oral histories, historic maps, company ledgers, and court documents, provides a comparative example for iron furnace villages in the area that are less well preserved. Understanding the...
Labor Heritage at the Homestead Waterfront (2016)
This paper explores the memory of the Battle of Homestead at the Waterfront shopping center and other related sites throughout Pittsburgh. Through interviews, site visits, and guided tours, I compare the approaches to this memory by various involved groups, such as developers, artists and community organizations. My analysis employs an archaeology of supermodernity to consider the authorized heritage discourse surrounding the Battle of Homestead as it relates to sites of labor struggle in the...
Labor History and Worker Visibility in Mexican Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Oral History, Coloniality, and Community Collaboration in Latin America" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The manual labor involved in the production of archaeological knowledges tends to go unacknowledged, and archaeologists have historically had epistemological authority over the interpretation of the past. In Latin America, acknowledging Indigenous labor in archaeology often focuses on restoring...
The labor of making: Crafting ceramics in Medieval South India (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the question of labor in the study of crafted objects from archaeological contexts. Working with an assemblage of excavated ceramics from a Medieval (12th-14th century CE) settlement at Maski (northern Karnataka), it problematizes the categories proposed by the political-economy oriented framework of “craft production...
Labor Relations and Ceramic Technology in Spanish Northwest Florida (1698-1763) (2023)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists have traditionally applied a dichotomy to the classification of ceramics recovered from Northwest Florida presidios, reflecting broad assumptions about labor relations in the Spanish Southeast U.S. Ceramic sorting typically begins with the assumption that low-fired, hand-formed wares were produced by Native potters of the Southeast U.S. High-fired, wheel-thrown, or...
Laboring along the Rio Grande: Contextualizing Labor of the Spanish Early Colonial Period of New Mexico. (2018)
Labor was a core component of the early period (1598-1680) of Spanish colonization of New Mexico. After failing to uncover mineral wealth in their new colony, the Spaniards kept their colony afloat by focusing on another exploitable resource: Indigenous labor. Historical archaeologists (e.g Silliman 2001, 2004; Voss 2008) have recently been reconsidering colonialism from a framework grounded in labor relationships. We know that Pueblo Indians and enslaved Plains people were forced to work on...
Laboring on the Edge: The Loma Prieta Mill and the Timber Industry in Nineteenth Century California (2018)
From 1870 until 1920 the Loma Prieta timber mill ranked as one of California’s largest and most productive in terms of board-feet cut. Beginning operations a few years after the gold rush, workers were immigrants from many lands with aspirations for a better life than the one they left behind. The company clear-cut through ancient redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains, providing timber for regional railroads, housing, and building of San Francisco. Following deforestation the region was...
Labor’s Failure? (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. Much of the archaeology and history of labor is based on organized labor, unions, and strikes, and the common rhetoric emphasizes the success or failure of union strike activities. This frames labor activism as analogous to sporting events with clear winners and losers and inadvertently adopts the vantage point of capital. As we...
Land, Lumber and Labor (2016)
Coalwood, a cordwood camp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, provides an ideal setting to talk about internally related aspects of capitalist production from the vantage points of land, lumber, and labor. The cordwood produced at Coalwood from 1900-1912 was used to fuel pig iron furnaces owned by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. Comparison of company reports, censuses, and local historical information suggest a dramatic change in the organization of production at Coalwood that coincides with the...
Landscape, Labor, and the Production of Difference in Colonial Peru: Indios and Negros in the Zaña Valley, 16th through 18th centuries C.E. (2016)
Historians and historical anthropologists have long suggested that racial and ethnic categories in the Spanish colonial Americas were discursively produced. But it is only recently that historical archaeologists have begun to chart the roles that household practices, economic transactions, and settlement configurations played in their emergence and reproduction. Archaeological excavations and documentary research on sites in Peru’s Zaña valley provide new perspectives on how indianess and...
Landscapes of Labor in the 17th Century Potomac Valley (2018)
Laboring people, especially the enslaved, are often considered to be archaeologically invisible during the first century of settlement in the colonial Chesapeake. In this paper I focus on key aspects of landscapes—fields, forests, and rivers—to consider how a landscape approach can illuminate the daily practice of enslaved Africans and indentured servants in the 17th century. While the focus on productive labor was tobacco cultivation that underpinned the economy, alternate economies dependent...
Learning To Live: Gender And Labor At Indian Boarding Schools (2016)
In 1879, the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school for Native American children was opened at the site of a former army barracks in Pennsylvania. Several additional facilities were soon established throughout the United States. Guided by official policies of assimilation and goals of fundamentally transforming the identities of their pupils, these institutions enrolled thousands of individuals from a multitude of tribal communities, sometimes forcibly. Once at school, students...
Life and Labor at a Small Quicklime Production Operation in Sierra Nevada (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Holmes' Colfax quicklime manufacturing site, located near Colfax in Sierra Nevada, was uncovered as a result of the River Fire in 2021. While the site is certainly important for addressing questions about technology, perhaps the more impressive aspect is the density and diversity of the artifact...
Living in Work Spaces and Working in Living Spaces: Intersections of Labor and Domesticity in the Enslaved Community at Montpelier. (2015)
The lives of the members of the enslaved community at James Madison’s plantation in Virginia, Montpelier, were shaped by the types of work they were expected to do in order to keep the president’s mansion and farm running smoothly. Archaeological excavations at several different early 19th century enslaved households at Montpelier reveal the way their inhabitant’s labors influenced the domestic activities which took place within and around these structures. By comparing and contrasting the...
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...
Making Communities Work: Organizational Diversity in the Eastern Woodlands of North America (2015)
Stephen Kowalewski has advanced a number of conceptual frameworks for the comparative study of organizational complexity. His multiscalar, cross-cultural approach permits the recognition of broad patterns while incorporating meaningful variation. In a 2013 paper, Steve explores the "work" involved in the formation of large, co-residential communities. He suggests that we might productively focus on the labor process, as community members purposefully redirected people’s time, energy, and...
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...
Notes From The Underground: Archaeological Fieldworkers Unite! (2001)
Does making archaeology profitable as a business in a capitalist economy necessitate the exploitations of the profession's workers? Some views on the ethical implications and class dimensions of capitalist archaeology in the context of lived experiences of archaeological fieldworkers organizing for changes in the US and UK.
Oberly Island Phase III (1996)
Photos taken by the editor of The Underground showing the Oberly Island Phase III excavation.
Particularal Histories of Diaspora: Historical Archaeology on the Cormandal Coast (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Trinidad, Gudeloupe; Suriname, and Jamaica; Maurituius, Reunion, Singapore and the Cape, Fiji, Singapore, malyasia and the Phillipines. All of these are places that share one apparent factor. South Asians, of multiple denominations, genders and castes circulated in the Indian, pacific, and Atlantic oceans as enslaved and indentured...
Pharaonic Power and Architectural Labor Investment at the Karnak Temple Complex, Egypt (2016)
Labor investment studies, based on the notion that the energy of people is quantifiable, give an invaluable and unique insight into the architectural pursuits of past societies. This labor study of ancient Egypt provides a better understanding of authority among Egyptian pharaohs as represented by their legacy of monumental architecture. A site of profound importance to Egyptian society was the Karnak Temple Complex, specifically the precinct of Amun, which was aggrandized by pharaonic...