Ambiguous Matter: The Life of Mine Waste

Source at https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA/article/view/21645.This paper explores mine waste that originates from resource extraction by specifically focusing on waste rock, tailings, dust and material culture from the resource extraction industry. By drawing on examples from fieldwork, archives, local media commentary and limited interviews from two iron-mining regions in Arctic Norway and sub-Arctic Canada, this paper follows mine waste as it routinely transgresses attempts to be managed. Mine waste spills out of its prescribed sinks, it oscillates between being considered waste to heritage to potentially valuable commodity, and it blurs the boundaries between spaces dedicated for mining and for non-mining. In following these trends, the paper calls for attentiveness to the ambiguous materiality of mine waste and how heterogeneity and excess circumscribe attempts at easy characterisation and management of the ubiquitous wastes that come to dominate mining regions. As such, archaeological approaches to studying mine waste can illustrate how mine waste becomes the default, lived-with condition of life in regions dominated by ongoing mining operations

Living with socialism: Toward an archaeology of a post-soviet industrial town

While the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left a heavy legacy in the form of industrial towns, residential buildings, infrastructure networks, and ecological damage that extends the Soviet Union’s effective history into the present day. This paper explores this legacy through the perspective of contemporary archaeology to better understand how material culture from the Soviet period is being reused in the present concerning the resource extractive industry. Research focuses on the nickel, copper, and cobalt-processing town of Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast in northwest Russia. By employing a combination of historical sources and fieldwork, the paper demonstrates how things from the Soviet past are being repurposed in the post-Soviet present. This in turn limits possibilities for imagined possible futures by its residents. The paper concludes by highlighting the need to pay attention to the material culture of the resource extraction industry itself when studying its persistent legacies

High and Dry - Contextualizing Domestic Root Cellar Drains in Southern Ontario

The subterranean root cellar is the quintessential feature of rural nineteenth-century archaeological sites in Ontario and much archaeological, historical, and architectural research on rural farmsteads has focused on defining and understanding these structures. However, this work has neglected an important component of this feature – the root cellar drain. This paper contextualizes these features within their broader nineteenth-century ideals of drainage and goes on to tackle the topic with the use of statistical analysis on the associated geographical, social, and economic attributes. The discussion presents opportunities that are present from the vast quantities of historical sites that have been excavated in the past several decades. Going beyond simple comparisons of small handfuls of sites, one future for historical archaeology lies in statistical approaches on vast quantities of data available in the grey literature. As a result, this study shows a slow but steady acceptance of scientific farming practices in rural Ontario but also resistance, variation, and contraction of the published agricultural literature at the time. This goes to show that even the humblest, most mundane archaeological features have interesting stories to tell

Vestiges of a Previous Industrial Age: A Contemporary Archaeology of Twentieth Century Single Industrial Mining Regions in the Far North

This thesis aims to develop archaeological understandings of mining communities and sites in three (sub-)Arctic regions in Norway (Sør-Varanger), Canada (western Labrador), and Russia (Kola Peninsula), all of which underwent rapid industrial colonisation during the twentieth century. Today the regions continue as resource peripheries despite economic, social, and political changes that made the construction of single industrial settlements no longer tenable. As such, these regions are “vestiges” of a previous industrial age – objects of the past that make up and influence the present that also contain potentials to be remobilized and serve new purposes. The thesis addresses four basic questions: Q1: To what extent did material legacies emerging from a period of significant government interest and investment in the regions survive into the present and how do they continue to persist in a time where investment into social services has declined and industrial labour has become more flexible? Q2: What tensions arise when things from this prosperous past find new purposes in the present or remain recalcitrantly redundant? Q3: What does the urge to give things from the past “usefulness” tell us about the temporal and geographical boundaries of the resource extraction industry in the (sub-)Arctic? Q4: How does one do an archaeology of non-abandoned sites? The thesis addresses these questions from a new materialist perspective and a multi-sited methodological approach that combined fieldwalking, photographic documentation, archival research, and select interviews. Through articles and the discussions in this introductory text, it advances knowledge in three areas that have been called “Pasts in the Present”, “The Working Fine and the Broken”, and “An Archaeology of Non-Abandonment” to develop understandings of how one can archaeologically engage with ongoing industrial regions in the present. Specifically, it highlights how everyone is physically and materially entangled in the past, how heritage discourses should move away from dichotomies between things that are working fine and things that are broken, and how archaeology and heritage should abandon the notion of “abandonment” as a useful heuristic concept to make room for alternative understandings of how the present grows out from the foundations of the past

Not just fisherfolk: winter housing and the seasonal lifeways of rural Euro-Newfoundlanders

From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, European and European-descendent people in rural parts of the island of Newfoundland practiced a semimigratory, i.e. transhumant, tradition known colloquially as winter housing. This tradition saw rural Euro-Newfoundlanders shift their primary homes from the fishing villages in the summer to wintering camps in more sheltered areas of the island where they hunted, trapped, cut lumber, and prepared for the next fishing season. Through examination of written and oral accounts on the tradition and archaeological surveys of five different winter houses, this research seeks to broaden the understanding of this tradition. It is argued that instead of being apart from the fishery, winter houses are elements of a deeply complex, integrated, organic system that allowed early Euro-Newfoundlanders to maximize life in their environment and survive in a rugged, unpredictable, North Atlantic environment. Euro-Newfoundlanders were not just fisherfolk but adaptable, resourceful residents of their island home

Living with Heritage: Involuntary Entanglements of the Anthropocene – An Introduction

Source at https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA/article/view/23988.Heritage has come to be understood as a set of valued objects, landscapes and prac-tices to be preserved and maintained for the benefit of present and future generations (Harrison 2020, 20–31). In recent years, commitments to safeguard and care for heritage have proliferated, fuelled by perceptions of threat that urge caretakers to act before it is too late (Holtorf 2015; DeSilvey and Harrison 2020). This rhetoric has been exacerbated by the global climate crisis that has rendered archaeological sites, landscapes and monuments even more fragile, testing the limits of conventional ideas of stewardship and management of heritage resources

Geospatial Data on Parade: The Results and Implications of the GIS Analysis of Remote Sensing and Archaeological Excavation Data at Fort York’s Central Parade Ground

This article presents a case study on the application of geographical information systems (GIS) in the context of military archaeology at the Fort York National Historic Site (AjGu-26) in Toronto, Ontario. By employing GIS to amalgamate data from historic mapping, ground penetrating radar, LiDAR, and 30 years of archaeological investigation, the authors reconstruct the historic landscape at the central parade ground of this national historic site. In doing so, they identify the remains of an early 19th-century vice-regal building that served as the official residence of the lieutenant governors of Upper Canada before the American forces burned it down in 1813—an important event that later provided the justification for the British destruction of the White House. With the successful application of GIS to amalgamate multiple lines of evidence, the article serves as another case for the broader acceptance of digital data technologies into the standard methodological toolkits of archaeologists

Geospatial Data on Parade: The Results and Implications of GIS Analysis of Remote Sensing and Archaeological Excavation Data at Fort York’s Central Parade Ground

Source at https://orb.binghamton.edu/neha/vol44/iss1/6.This article presents a case study on the application of geographical information systems (GIS) in the context of military archaeology at the Fort York National Historic Site (AjGu-26) in Toronto, Ontario. By employing GIS to amalgamate data from historic mapping, ground penetrating radar, LiDAR, and 30 years of archaeological investigation, the authors reconstruct the historic landscape at the central parade ground of this national historic site. In doing so, they identify the remains of an early 19th-century vice-regal building that served as the official residence of the lieutenant governors of Upper Canada before the American forces burned it down in 1813—an important event that later provided the justification for the British destruction of the White House. With the successful application of GIS to amalgamate multiple lines of evidence, the article serves as another case for the broader acceptance of digital data technologies into the standard methodological toolkits of archaeologists

A contemporary archaeology of pandemic

Global crises drastically alter human behavior, rapidly impacting patterns of movement and consumption. A rapid-response analysis of material culture brings new perspective to disasters as they unfold. We present a case study of the coronavirus pandemic in Tromsø, Norway, based on fieldwork from March 2020 to April 2021. Using a methodology rooted in social distancing and through systematic, diachronic, and spatial analysis of trash (e.g., discarded gloves, sanitization products), signage, and barriers, we show how material perspectives improve understanding of relationships between public action and government policy (in this case examined in relation to the Norwegian concept of collective labor, dugnad). We demonstrate that the materiality of individual, small-scale innovations and behaviors that typified the pandemic will have the lowest long-term visibility, as they are increasingly replaced or outnumbered by more durable representations generated by centralized state and corporate bodies that suggest close affinity between state directive and local action. We reflect on how the differential durability of material responses to COVID-19 will shape future memories of the crisis

How to Record Current Events like an Archaeologist

This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods—including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling—to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response