The Landscape is a Machine: Transnational and Labor Heritage Landscapes of the Anthracite Coal Region

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Communicating Working Class Heritage in the 21st Century: Values, Lessons, Methods, and Meanings" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the nineteenth century, migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe settled in Northeast Pennsylvania to work in Anthracite coal mines. In places such as the margins of the company town of Lattimer, they created intimate landscapes with a spatial logic defined both by ethnic values, but also as a central component of the broader industrial order dependent upon transient unskilled labor. Either way, landscape is a machine, reproducing social order through material means. Adjacent to the homogenously-ordered grid of a typical company town, an enclave of shanties around Lattimer appearing in the late 19th century resembles a small Southern Italian town plopped into the Pennsylvania landscape. But does archaeology and spatial analysis support such a  superficial assesment? In contrast, how does such a landscape appear within the scholarship of heritage studies?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Communicating Working Class Heritage in the 21st Century: Values, Lessons, Methods, and Meanings

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 445