Jed Levin's assessment of the state of IA is a good one. As he remarks,
the SIA drew a diverse group of individuals in the early 1970s.
Increasingly, however, concerns with the humanistic interpretation of
industrial sites fell into disfavor. Those of us using the methods and
perspectives of industrial archaeology to address the culture of industry
found ourselves pushed further and further to the margins of a society
consumed with ever narrower technological interests or engaged in
the minutae of specific site histories. While it would seem that there should
be room for all sorts of perspectives in the study of industrial
archaeology, time and practice have demonstrated the opposite.
Perhaps this is the time to recapture some of IA's early
humansitic impulses and forge a field a study where considerations of
culture and technology inform one another as they do in other branches of
archaeology and material culture study.
 
Bernie Herman
Center for Historic Architecture
Department of Art History
University of Delaware