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Reviews
| The Archaeology of Industrialization. Ed. by David Barker and David Cranstone. Leeds, England: Manley Publishing, 2004. iii+333 pp., illus., maps, tables, notes, bibl., index. $93 hb (ISBN 1-904350-01-1).
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This volume collects the proceedings of a 1999 conference on the archaeology of industrialization, jointly hosted by Britain's Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA) and the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (SPMA), and four papers from an earlier (1995) joint conference between SPMA and the Historical Metallurgy Society. Reviewing a volume of conference proceedings is always a daunting job. Reviewing one from two conferences sponsored by three different organizations is even more complex.
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The title—The Archaeology of Industrialization—is a bit misleading. The volume does deal with archaeology and with industrialization, but it does this primarily within the British context. Only 2 of the volume's 23 papers touch on other than British industrialization. A better title would have been The Archaeology of British Industrialization.
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The 23 papers cover a variety of topics, and other than the rather broad theme of "industrialization," the links among them are sometimes tenuous—not surprising to those familiar with the background of the two primary sponsoring organizations. AIA and SPMA have different origins and developed different intellectual interests and approaches. One of the editors observed that the organizations have been described as mirror images (p. 314). Their members have even occasionally denigrated their opposite numbers, but both organizations have had at least some interest in industrialization, and these shared interests brought them together in their first significant collaboration.
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In a review of this size, it is not possible to give an account of each of the papers, but a taste of the volume's contents is possible. In terms of conceptual approach, the papers run the gamut from postmodern abstraction to the hard sciences as illustrated by the first two papers in the volume. David Uzzell's "The Dialectic of Past-Present Relations" focuses on two psychological processes that influence understanding of the world: the perception of time and the social construction of knowledge. He questions whether the past is knowable. Justine Bayley and David Crossley's "Archaeological Science As an Aid to the Study of Post-Medieval Industrialization" has the positivistic attitude of the hard sciences and calls for the wider application of scientific techniques to the archaeology of the industrial era, like dendrochronology, which has largely been restricted to prehistoric archaeology.
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A number of the papers are likely to be of particular interest to readers of IA. For instance, Crossley has a very good discussion of waterpower and its impact on the Sheffield area's landscape. Michael Nevell and John Walker provide a solid discussion of the industrialization of the countryside around Manchester. Those interested in issues of historic preservation will find coverage of several critical issues in papers like Anna Badcock and Brian Malaws's piece on "Recording People and Processes at Large Industrial Structures" and Tamara Rogic's "Industrial Buildings and Their Evaluation." Rogic points out that the evaluation of structures for preservation should consider the processes that went on inside buildings in addition to external appearance. Particularly enjoyable was Erik Nijhof's paper, which compared the very different approaches to preservation (or lack thereof) of mining heritage in three different regions in continental Europe: the German Ruhr and Dutch and Belgian Limburg.
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The volume has separate sections on the archaeology of mining (Landscapes of Mining, three papers) and ceramic artifacts (Artefacts and Industry, two papers). One of the best papers in the volume appears in the mining section: Alan Blackburn's "From Pick to Powder: Phases of Change in a North Pennine Landscape." This very nicely organized and well-illustrated essay is an in-depth study of a Pennine valley in which lead mining occurred over several centuries. Blackburn synthesized both historical and archaeological records to describe how the shifting roles of technological, social, and economic factors affected the organization of the lead industry and the landscape of that valley.
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Another theme touched on by a number of papers in the volume is "landscape." Separate sections group papers that deal with industry and the rural landscape (five papers) and industry and the urban landscape (three papers).
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Some of the volume's papers have only a very loose link to conventional industrial archaeology, with its emphasis on industrial processes and production. These papers fall more in the area that Americans term historical archaeology, with its emphasis on consumers and consumption items. Harold Mytum in his contribution, for example, looks at rural burials in the 19th century. Using several local cemeteries, he argues that they reflect trends in industrialization and consumerism as archaeologically manifested. The same tenuous connection to industrial archaeology exists in Yolanda Courtney's study of 19th-century pub tokens and Roger Leech's paper on the housing built in late-17th and early-18th-century Bristol and its relation to Atlantic trade, especially the slave trade. Leech's paper reads more like urban history than either postmedieval or industrial archaeology, but it points to questions raised by the study of Bristol housing that only archaeology is likely to be able to answer, such as changes in material culture brought about by the new housing made possible by the Atlantic trade.
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A short opening essay by Marilyn Palmer of AIA and a closing essay by David Cranstone of SPMA point to the importance of collaboration between the two organizations and their members, the volume's themes, and directions for research.
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| In the end, The Archaeology of Industrialization has the weaknesses one should expect from a volume of compiled conference papers sponsored by two different organizations. The themes that link the papers are tenuous at times, and the papers vary significantly in approach and quality. Moreover, only a portion are likely to be of interest to most readers; however, virtually any reader of IA is guaranteed to find something of interest in this volume, and some of the papers are very good. |
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