Fadeaway Environments and How Infrastructure Change Creates Ghost Towns and Societal Remnants

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Infrastructure decisions influence human settlement and can leave archaeologic and geographic evidence for us to discover and decipher. Discovery in that much of this evidence has faded away into the environmental background of current human occupation and can be rediscovered by archaeologic and geographic sleuthing. Small towns and settled places in the Great Plains exhibit examples of the traits of fading and disappearing into the settled landscape. This presentation looks at two places that have faded from human notice due to infrastructure change: Winnipeg Junction, MN, and VanHook, ND. Both places have faded, but for different reasons. One was heavily influenced by a railroad, and the other by both a railroad and construction of a reservoir. How these places get rediscovered is also varied, one was revealed by an actual archaeological search and the other by drought. Evidence as to why they faded is also there to be discovered by archaeologic and geospatial investigation. We can also infer the infrastructure change and the consequences that led to the demise of these as settled places and the movement or erasure of the cultural evidence. In both cases, the environment also drove both the infrastructure decisions and the consequences of change.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37338.0