Archaeologies of Mining and Industry

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Pelto.

The Clifton site (20KE53), located on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, was the settlement site for the Cliff Mine, the first profitable copper mine in Michigan. Operating throughout the 1850s and 60s, the town of Clifton began to disappear around 1871 when the Boston and Pittsburgh mining company ceased operations and began to lease out the land to individual prospectors. The Industrial Archaeology program at Michigan Technological University has been performing field work...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dayna Giambastiani. Shannon S. Mahoney.

The success of the mining industry in eastern Nevada during the late nineteenth century was heavily reliant upon regional charcoal production. Charcoal burners (colliers) converted the surrounding pinyon and juniper woodland into fuel for the smelters used to process mined ore. The colliers, who were primarily Italian-Swiss charcoal burners known as Carbonari, strategically located camp and production sites in order to keep up with the continuous demand for charcoal as the wood supply dwindled....

DOCUMENT Citation Only V. Camille Westmont.

Archaeologists from the University of Maryland have been investigating labor history in the towns of Lattimer 1 and Lattimer 2, both located in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men and young boys were frequently employed in the coal industry, while women and girls were employed in the silk and the textile industries, which had moved into the area to bypass the unionization efforts of textile workers in New England. The rise of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brad Botwick.

Although Georgia is usually viewed as an agricultural state, it contains numerous economically significant minerals, many of which were extracted and/or processed on a large scale. To better understand these industries and their archaeological correlates, and to assist in evaluating their significance, Georgia Department of Transportation sponsored a historical context that described the development of mining and quarrying in the state. Among these industries, crushed stone was important in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Blondino.

In the summer of 2012, Dovetail Cultural Resource Group conducted Phase II investigations at Accokeek Furnace, an 18th century ironworks in Stafford County, Virginia. While the furnace’s historical claim to fame may be its association with George Washington’s father, Augustine, it was well-known during its heyday as a large, profitable, and well-managed operation producing some of the highest-quality iron of any of the local works. Although the complex around the furnace comprised hundreds of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy James Scarlett.

Michigan Technological University has established a cluster of interdisciplinary degree programs in Industrial Archaeology (MS) and Industrial Heritage and Archaeology (PhD), pioneering new areas among our partner and allied institutions around the world. Concurrent with a generational turnover of faculty, the university has introduced new degrees programs, including a new collaborative MS in Industrial Archaeology developed in partnership with the AmeriCorps Volunteer in Service To America...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Quentin Lewis. Adrian Green. Thomas Yarrow.

This paper proposes an archaeology of energy, probing the historical materialities of heat, light, and power. Our modern high carbon world is the result of a series of historical and material processes in which objects, peoples, spaces, and relationships coalesced into regimes of energy. The traces of these regimes are visible in material things and can be investigated archaeologically. We offer up a case study from an epicenter of the transition to a high carbon world: 17th and 18th century...