"Patrick E. Martin (Patrick Martin)" wrote:

> I think that you'll find contemporary industrial archaeology as practiced
> in the UK much broader and more adequate if you take the opportunity to
> look at recent publications, particularly the work of Marilyn Palmer and
> Peter Neaverson, such as "Industrial Archaeology, Principles and Practice",
> Routledge, 1998, any of David Crossley's work, and recent issues of the
> Industrial Archaeology Review.   Increasing emphasis on workers'
> communities, landscapes, and truly archaeological perspectives on
> industrial society has changed the face of IA in recent years.  The view
> that it "has virtually nothing to do with the archaeology of everyday life"
> is thankfully out of date.

Time to go into partial furious backtracking mode again, obviously...

Can I claim to have been taken out of context?  It works for
politicians.
Sometimes.

Written with a little less flippancy....:
Obviously there is some excellent industrial archaeology out there, and
I happily acknowledge that it is far more willing to deal with wider
social
contexts than it used to.  Marilyn Palmer gave a lecture here at York a
couple of years ago that I enjoyed tremendously.  My off the cuff remark
about "everyday life" was somewhat unfortunate in the context.  That
said,
I still stand by my remark that industrial archaeology is a painfully
inadequate
term to describe the _full_ panoply (with emphasis on full) of the
archaeology
of Britain post-1750.  Obviously the industrial revolution had a
tremendous impact on the United Kingdom, but there is increasingly a
theoretically-aware archaeology of non-industrial sites that nonetheless
post-date the industrial revolution.  I would argue, for example, that
Welsh rural farm sites(see latest edition of the SHA newsletter) would
sit
very uncomfortably within the field "industrial archaeology".
Industrial
archaeology is an important subdiscipline, I was just uncomfortable with
Dr. Schuyler's suggestion that the division between Post-Medieval
archaeology
and Industrial archaeology in Britain is period based when in fact the
two
often co-exist.
It's worth noting, however, that many of the people doing the
archaeology
of Britain post-1750 do tend to use the term "historical archaeology"
rather than "post-medieval".


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Alasdair Brooks
Department of Archaeology
University of York
King's Manor
York
YO1 2EP
England, UK
phone: 01904 433931
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The Buffalo tastes the same on both sides of the border"
Sitting Bull