Jamie Brothers wrote a list of the lessons that could be learned from a
nineteenth-century foundry site:
>Given the relative dearth of archaeological information on iron production
>sites
>(vis-a-vis 19C domestic sites), digging more is an excellent idea. The more we
>excavate the more we will understand what is available to recover. 19C sites
>also have the added advantage that they very often have company documents.
>Some
>of the information you could recover from such a site might include:
>1- what kind of metal they were running.
>2- The temperatures of the furnaces.
>3- Varieties of casting techniques being used.
>4- Recover pieces of failed products, to better understand the production
>process.
>5- Problems with the process
>6- pieces of machinery/plant would allow for a better understanding of the
>operation. It is one thing to have a diagram of what a particular facility
>"looked" like. It is at least as valuable to have parts of the physical plant
>to analyze. This would help to understand the stresses of the operation
>and the
>real as opposed to idealized facility.
This is a remarkably comprehensive list of archaeological questions, but it
is not a "traditional" archaeological/anthropolgical list. You'll note
that nothing in this list concerns Marxist theory, or worker residence
patterns, or gender relationsips, or personal consumption of material
goods. It doesn't say a thing about ethnicity. Is it, therefore, legitimate
archaeology?
I contend that Jamie's concerns are equally as valuable as the others, and
should be equally as important to any archaeologist confronting the site.
Archaeology must never be defined in terms of questions generated by a
single discipline. It happens too often, but it is wrong.
When we investigate a site, we are (or should be) field agents of all the
disciplines with a legitimate interest. A foundry site will be useful to
historians of technology and historical metallurgists, so it follows that
we must write authoritatively to those audiences, or we fail in our
professional responsibility.
If I were digging a foundry, a metallurgist and a historian of ironworking
technology would be on the team, probably as co-principal investigators.
The technology is that important. This should be self-evident, but sadly
to report, it is not.
We can't smugly reserve the field of "archaeology" to "anthropological"
concerns, and we dare not evaluate sites only in terms of the current
academic anthropological buzzword, even though it sometimes may seem that
the only signficant sites reported nowadays have a Marxist message urgently
to impart.
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|Baby the\ I'd really like to have a Jeep.
|1969 Land\_|===|_ Baby needs something to pull out
| ___Rover ___ |o of the mud with her new winch.
|_/ . \______/ . ||
___\_/________\_/____________________________________________
Ned Heite, Camden, DE http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html
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