Making Waste Singular: The Ecological Life of Industrial Waste in Mill Creek Ravine

Summary

This is an abstract from the "One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Industrialization is defined by the mass production of commodities, explicitly produced to be non-singular objects.  However, as scholars such as Igor Kopytoff have argued, commodities are singularized through their unique histories of social relations. Alongside the production of commodities, industrialization is marked by the massive production of undifferentiated waste. Unlike commodities, this waste largely resists singularization due to its inability to be usefully incorporated into social life.   Highlighting a thin film of polluted river silt as a singular object, this paper tracks the ecological and social lives that mark its decomposition over time.  Focusing on the history of this river silt, excavated from an early twentieth-century workers’ camp in Edmonton, Alberta, I argue that industrial waste can be singularized ecologically rather than strictly socially.  Attending to the ecological life of industrial waste reveals how the afterlives of industrial pollution are not constrained by the usual timeline of production and consumption. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 373