First, let me say that I do not accept traditional historians'
emphasis on Taylorism as a turning-point in workplace history. Taylor
was a good salesman, but his product had been around a long time. In
the gunpowder and charcoal iron industries, to name but two, the
revolution was old hat by the time Taylor was out of short pants.

The eighteenth-century charcoal iron industry could not have existed
without a profound management understanding of principles that came
to be identified with late-nineteenth-century industrial reforms.  At
Hopewell Furnace, Pennsylvania, we were able to provide
archaeological insight into management processes that ensured "just
in time" delivery of charcoal (a perishable raw material) to the
furnace stack. It was apparent from the archaeological record that
the provision of charcoal was a carefully orchestrated manufacturing
process with planning time-frames that extended not only across an
entire campaign but through a cyclical program that took a whole
generation to complete.

A report of this complex system, from the perspective of business and
industrial process organization, was submitted to the journal IA, but
the editors (not the present incumbent) deleted most references to
the potential implications of archaeological studies in larger
studies of business history and workplace development.

There is a crying need for archaeologists of all sorts, not just
industrial archaeologists, to involve themselves in other
disciplines, which might include genealogy, historical geography,
economic history, and history of technology.  We produce a whole
literature that touches on these disciplines, yet our output tends to
be missed in their research.

Part of this communication failure is our own tendency to mumble
among ourselves.  We seem, from the outside, to value opacity as a
style of writing, and profundity as an ultimate goal for even the
simplest studies.  We fail to write popular interpretations. We don't
do papers at meetings of other disciplines, and we don't sell the
product we produce.

Many years ago, when I was working in a Business Administration
department, I published an article on the archaeology and history of
a regional industry. Our chairman (who fancied himself a business
historian) read my article and came to me with a really puzzled
expression. "This is business history," he said, as if somehow the
article had been misplaced in an archaeological journal. Of course it
was business history. We do a lot of that, but business historians
don't generally pick up archaeological journals.  Since Business
Administration departments don't normally hire archaeologists, it's
incumbent upon the archaeologists to find other ways to reach them.

We need to somehow confound the comic-book image of the archaeologist
as Professor Diggbe LeDirt, an undernourished fellow with
bottle-bottom glasses who never combs his beard, washes his
underwear, or speaks in anything but obscure prose.  Even the Indiana
Jones movies were unable to exorcise this demon from our public
image. It's about time we started talking to the outside world.
--
Ned Heite  ([log in to unmask])
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