Labor (Other Keyword)
51-75 (123 Records)
The mid- to late-nineteenth century in California was marked by rapid and dramatic technological, economic, and social change. These transformations were spurred largely by the substantial influx of multiple diasporic communities from across the globe, being both pushed and pulled to the state by various factors. As a result, from their origin, many industries, places, and communities were multi-ethnic, with internal social and labor divisions being based on complex, fluid, and historically...
In the Shadow of Sugar: Dwelling in the Post-Emancipation Era, Montserrat (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological scholarship on Afro-Caribbean experiences in the Lesser Antilles has increasingly focused on the economic and social conditions of the post-emancipation period. This paper discusses material data collected from a plantation complex once containing a late 19th- to 20th-century village that supplied labor to the citrus lime industry on Montserrat. Excavated material...
Inexorably Contemporary: Archaeology as Performance Art at Italian Hall Memorial Site, Calumet, Michigan (2015)
In the Fall of 2012, students from Michigan Technological University undertook a Phase I site assessment of the three city lots of the Italian Hall Memorial in Calumet, Michigan, in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the disaster/massacre. The Keweenaw National Historical Park, which alternately owns or manages the three contiguous lots on behalf of the Village of Calumet, sought help with clearance of cultural resources before they could improve the quality of the memorial’s landscaping...
Intemperate Men: Alcohol and Autonomy Within the Lumber Camps of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Industrial capital often instilled discipline through control of social behaviors. Alcohol consumption was most often targeted due to its effects on worker productivity. Although many late 19th and early 20th century corporations had strict alcohol policies, the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company (CCI) never enforced sobriety within their lumber camps. CCI took a hands off approach to...
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Historical Analogy: Drawing Parallels Between Early 20th Century and Modern Immigrant Groups in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (2013)
In the town of Hazleton, PA, long-term residents exhibit a strong sense of American identity in reference to their ancestor’s immigration to the U.S. from Western, Southern and Eastern Europe in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Though members of this descendant group seem to be well aware of the ethnic and racial discrimination their forefathers faced, their views on a recent influx of Latino immigrants that have established themselves in the area are often surprisingly discriminative. In...
The Intersection of Identity, Labor, and Racism in Washington State Company Towns (2015)
This paper will propose research to address the intersection of identity, racism/racialization, and labor as manifested in the material and documentary remains of workers and administrators in Washington State company towns. From the mid-1800s to the Great Depression, logging and mining towns formed a critical part of state and regional economies. The archaeology of labor-related sites in this state and period has been historically under-researched, and the relationship between labor, racism,...
The Intersections of Race, Class, and Labor in New Spain: Archaeological, Bioarchaeological, and Ethnohistoric Perspectives from the Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper brings together archaeological, bioarchaeological, and ethnohistoric data to highlight how daily life was transformed in New Spain. In particular, we focus on labor as an avenue for understanding the complex relationships and negotiations between working individuals and the...
Intramural activities of a deerskin trading factory in colonial South Carolina (2013)
Fort Congaree, a government controlled trading factory and military outpost, was established to facilitate exchanges of indigenous produced deerskins for trade goods. Renewed archaeological excavations and historical research are opening new approaches to interpreting daily life at the site. Focusing primarily on material culture disposal patterns, this paper will identify activity areas within Fort Congaree and situate the occupation within colonial articulations of labor and exchange.
Introduction: Entangling Artisanal and Industrial Work in Archaeologies of Creativity (2013)
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...
Labor Landscapes of a Louisiana Sugarhouse (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Throughout southern Louisiana, the lands were subject to intensive agricultural cultivation, be it through cotton or rice, but mainly, sugar. The sugarhouse was a central node to early industrial production in the US Southeast for the many enslaved laborers and immigrant...
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...
Labor, Land Use, and Settlement at Hacienda del Rincón de Guadalupe, Apaxco, México (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many have argued that the hacienda of colonial Mexico represents the emergence of commercial enterprise through privately owned landed estates. However, these estates were not strictly economic units, but comprised a diverse social and political institution engaged in a complex interplay with the broader cultural landscape, transforming local environments...
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, Labor, and Community Life at the Great Estate: The Archaeological Investigation of Hacienda del Rincón de Guadalupe, Mexico. (2025)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The hacienda was an economic, social, and political institution engaged in a complex interplay with the broader cultural landscape of Mexico, transforming local environments and drastically reshaping communities. Haciendas were socially complex and were hierarchically organized according to both class and racial boundaries. Often,...
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...