Revolutionizing Rural Industries: Issues of Access and Scale

Summary

In recent years, industrial archaeology has come to be more associated with historical archaeology when it comes to creating perspectives from which to analyze the evidence of economic industries of all sorts. Farm sites and others that make up rural economic activities—mills, mines, etc.—are all sites of industry, and they should be studied together for a larger view of these industries from different economic and social scales, particularly in the regional sense. In southern Sweden from the 18th-early 20th centuries, inhabitants of farms of different types and sizes often had to combine many of these activities in order to make a living, due to rising populations, marginal environmental conditions, and other social problems. I look at several rural industrial sites in Småland and comparative sites and use a combination of historical and industrial perspectives to see if they were able to take up new advancements in technologies, and compare the results of that adoption on success and continuity. Mechanization and industrialization tended to allow larger players a better stake in their ownership, whereas those who had to cobble different industries together tended to have lower access to the technological adoption that could have made their futures more secure.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage