Polishing Slag: An Interpretive Metaphor for Domestic Artifacts from a Nineteenth-Century Industrial Community

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Slag, the byproduct of iron smelting, is found in abundance around the ruins of Longdale Furnace, one of many nineteenth-century iron companies active in western Virginia’s Alleghany Highlands. Also found in abundance are material remnants of workers’ everyday lives. While many of these ‘small finds’ are indicative of hard living and modest means, they also imply remarkable consumer agency – goods were purchased from the company store, the Sears catalogue, local vendors, and one another. What was left behind suggests an attempt to ‘polish slag:’ slag, when polished, can resemble beautifully-colored glass. From medicine bottles to mustache cups, from bud vases to baby-dolls, we find not merely ‘byproducts’ of life, but artifacts of life-affirming wellbeing practices. By bringing them home, Longdale residents worked to ‘polish’ the oftentimes harsh realities of industrial labor; by analyzing them, we recognize their ontological importance as mediums of care, comfort, joy, and leisure.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow