Unearthing a Pipeline: An Archaeological Investigation into Line 3 in Northern Minnesota

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent archaeological studies have shown how the methods and sensibilities of the discipline can be usefully drawn on to explore the history and relations of the Anthropocene—our current epoch of cultural and environmental instability. However, certain massively spatio-temporally distributed objects that define this era, what Timothy Morton calls hyper-objects, resist the traditional methods of archaeology. An oil pipeline like Enbridge’s Line 3 in Minnesota, for instance, stretches 337 miles across the state and has existed for six decades as infrastructure. Its influence is omnipresent in daily life, and yet as an object it remains inaccessible to both locals and researchers. The oil and thick steel of the pipeline exist five feet underground—impossibly large and invisible to the eye. Over 60 years old, the pipeline is also a historical object, one whose persistence has had an enormous impact on the many communities—those for, against, and indifferent—that live in its invisible wake. In this paper, I propose an archaeological investigation into the Enbridge pipeline, one that attempts to study how its material presence and invisibility has created tensions, engagements, and activism among communities located in its path over the past six decades.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37021.0