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Editorial
Reuse of a bridge, expansion of an industrial community, and a technical examination of an archaeological site—these diverse topics combine in this issue of IA. Robert Jackson's description of surviving spans of an early Mississippi River bridge brings technical detail and chance preservation together. Pushing railroads into the West required reliable spans across the Mississippi, and Jackson begins by reviewing the development of the first several bridges. Andrew Carnegie's Keystone Bridge Company built the superstructure of the bridge at Dubuque in 1868, then added identical cast- and wrought-iron approach spans in 1872. By the late 1880s, the approach spans were made redundant by the city filling in the low ground on the river, and the approach spans were sold to be used elsewhere. More than 100 years later, three of these spans survive and testify to the durability of the designs and materials used.
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SIA stalwart Patrick Malone provides us with an enlightening essay on the use of "surplus" waterpower in Lowell, Massachusetts. While the Lowell canal system has been described and analyzed extensively in the past, including by Malone, this matter of water usage at Lowell has not seen such scrutiny before this article. The analysis is of particular interest because it focuses on the crucial time period when steam was augmenting the capacity of the Lowell mills, and argues that expansion of the mills would not have been possible without the surplus flow.
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Charles Young and Kimberly Finch offer an example of remote sensing in an industrial archaeological site. At the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York, researchers are faced with the need to trace buried features without extensive and expensive excavations. However, the soils include massive amounts of iron and slag waste, conditions that are not conducive to the use of soil resistivity or magnetometry, two of the most common remote sensing techniques. Ground penetrating radar proved to be effective in this setting, as shown by Young and Finch. They provide a brief review of the methods and then discuss their results of the GPR surveys in selected areas of the site, including ground-truthing through traditional excavation.
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| A dozen book reviews round out this issue, thanks to Terry Reynolds and a careful group of reviewers. |
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