Transient Labor and the North American West

Summary

The organization of labor is a defining element of society.  In the case of the North American West this defining element is often marked by a reliance on seasonal and transient rural labor. In this paper I briefly characterize the transient workforce, discuss its archaeological signatures, and how we might incorporate these marginalized histories into our work. For all its historical importance, rural labor is not an easy topic of study, for reasons ranging from the structures and practices of contemporary archaeology to the practical problems of studying impoverished, mobile, and undocumented people. An understanding of this workforce will entail integrating disparate fields in the archaeology of the American West, such as the archaeologies of different industrial sectors, of ethnicity and migration, and industrial and social archaeologies, seeing these fields as moments in the movements and creation of transient workforces.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• A Different Angle of View: Doing Contemporary Historical Archaeology from the West

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 127