Migrant Invisibility in the Industrial Built Environment

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The industrial-era migration experience has long been a focus for historical archaeologists and historians of architecture alike. But how can methods from both archaeology and architecture be used to illuminate ethnic identity when typologies fail and standard built environment patterns prove invisible? This paper presents a work-in-progress investigating francophone migration from the Quebec hinterlands to Michigan’s industrial Keweenaw peninsula in the early twentieth century. Using a GIS-based historical spatial data infrastructure housed at Michigan Tech’s Geospatial Research Facility, we have mapped francophone migrants to their residences and workplaces over several decades. Architectural evidence, however, suggests no French-Canadian building types in the region, a surprising deficiency. Theoretical approaches to invisibility of this kind emerging from contemporary archaeology and architectural history offer some promise for understanding the embodied experiences of these migrants as they adjusted daily patterns, habits, and values to the new architectural spaces of modern industrial captialism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Archaeology/Architecture

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow