I am a historical archaeologist interested in the relationship between capitalism and landscape change. My doctoral research explored the role of progressive and scientific agriculture in the changing landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley, with a specific focus on the village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. I have since published this research with Springer's Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology series, and I continue to publish on (and be fascinated by) the archaeology, history, and culture of rural New England.
More generally I am interested in the application of social theory, particularly marxist and critical theories, to archaeology. I have a long-standing interest in the possibilities of GIS as a methodological tool for critical research. Supervisors: Robert Paynter
Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical And Underwater Archaeology, 2018
This paper introduces the session, and as a case study, explores utopias and utopian plans inspir... more This paper introduces the session, and as a case study, explores utopias and utopian plans inspired by conservative thinking and principles as examples of spatial play and landscape experimentation. The growth of the internet has allowed for the proliferation of like-minded communities as well as the broadcasting of political ideologies and proposals. During the 2000s, anti-government enthusiasm proliferated into a number of proposals for separatist communities within the United States, founded on visions of conservatism, free-market principles, firearms enthusiasm, and more. I utilize maps, accounts, and documents to show conservative utopias as both embodying similar principles socialist or utopias. At the same time, I argue that such communities enact similar contradictions inherent in all utopias, and that the continuation of concerted conservative political growth will obviate the need for such separatist spaces.
ABSTRACT Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe ... more ABSTRACT Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe how buildings constructed as part of an eighteenth century transition to a high carbon coal-based economy, are used and understood by their current inhabitants. Applied heritage research has tended to focus on the thermal and energetic properties of historic buildings, as distinct from their social meaning and use. A similar separation between the physical building and its social use is inherent in methodologies such as energy audits that constitute key devices through which buildings are institutionally managed. We argue that these perspectives have overlooked how a significant element of energy use arises from the complex practical interactions between people and infrastructure. From this perspective we argue that better outcomes for energy and heritage would result if greater contextual consideration was given to the existing possibilities afforded by historic buildings and their users.
This paper proposes an archaeology of the Great Depression in England by an examination of one at... more This paper proposes an archaeology of the Great Depression in England by an examination of one attempt to ameliorate its effects on the landscape. The north-east of England was badly hit by the Depression of the 1930s. Although the impact on urban areas, such as Tyneside, is well known, other parts of the region suffered equally, if not more, severely. In the rural ironstone mining areas of Cleveland unemployment hit the staggering level of 91%. As an effort to ameliorate the effects of this, a local gentry couple, Major James Pennyman (1883-1961) and his wife Ruth rented some plots of uncultivated land near the villages of Margrove Park and Boosbeck to be used as a communal gardening and agricultural plot for unemployed Ironstone workers in the area. There were four plots in total: ―Heartbreak Hill‖, between Margrove Park and Boosbeck, ―Dartmoor‖ south-adjacent to Margrove Park, and ―Busky Fields‖, two plots adjacent to the pit village of Stanghow. Miners could work in the allotments, and receive payment in produce, depending upon the amount of work time they put in. The land was cleared under the organization of rural revivalist and right-wing political figure Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), who brought in university and private-school students to assist the miners in this clearance. Gardiner and Pennyman were interested in side-stepping the socialist and labour movements then prevalent in urban Teesside by rooting Heartbreak Hill in conservative and racialist assumptions about the purity of the English countryside and the landowning class system. And yet, the communal structure of labor at the camp, as well as related cultural movements that foregrounded socialist politics, including a locally produced opera about Robin Hood, meant that Heartbreak Hill was ultimately a more politically ambiguous experiment than its origins with prominent conservatives might suggest. This paper acts as prologue to a new project to explore the materiality of these sites. We intend to begin to explore the way in which the experience of unemployment and responses to it were created, mediated and constrained by the physical and social landscapes within which the participants were situated.
This paper takes an archaeological approach to the modern High Street of the town of Stockton in ... more This paper takes an archaeological approach to the modern High Street of the town of Stockton in the Northeast of England. Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, Stockton is currently undergoing a wave of urban renewal, but this is only the most recent iteration of an ongoing material and social process. Over the last two hundred years (and even farther back), Stockton has been re-made many times. A record of this urban renewal can be seen in the town's High Street, which presents a pastiche of 19th, 20th, and 21st century architecture. These remakings were materializations of the hopes, goals, and possibilities of various groups and individuals, and their struggles at multiple social, economic, and political scales. And they foreclosed and incorporated previous groups' and individuals' efforts at remaking. In this paper, I document and discuss some of the the buildings on the modern High street, with the ultimate goal of exploring the social context of urban renewal in modern and historical Stockton. Along the way, I offer some prospective thoughts about archaeologies of urban renewal, the materiality of "creative destruction" embodied in Stockton High Street, and the complex articulations of modernity, preservation, and capitalism inherent in such a materiality.
This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19 th century rural
Massachusetts. Impro... more This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19 th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18 th and 19 th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. Th meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profi and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profi and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19 th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
Th subject of this chapter is white supremacy, though not in the way that
term is usually used. R... more Th subject of this chapter is white supremacy, though not in the way that term is usually used. Rather, the focus is how, in the late nineteenth century, a group of people in the village of Deerfild, Massachusetts used objects, spaces, and historical events to assert their white identity in order to reclaim a threatened cultural and economic authority. While white supremacy was not their avowed or explicit intention, the effcts of their actions constructed Deerfild as a “white public space,” as defied by Enoch Page and R. Brooke Thmas (1994). By organizing the way histories were told and spaces were experienced, Deerfild’s Anglo descendants spatialized racial privilege through a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion. Th landscape they created excluded Native people in the region, whom they cast in historical narratives as racially undeserving of social or cultural standing. Deerfild’s white Anglo residents and newer populations of marginally white or nonwhite immigrants who pledged allegiance to the cultural and social supremacy of the town’s founders were included in this landscape of privilege. Recent effrts to decolonize Deerfild have critiqued and contextualized this landscape, but the space these Anglo antiquarians created is largely the landscape of the village today
The modern world has seen a variety of agricultural crises deriving from a
problem known as the “... more The modern world has seen a variety of agricultural crises deriving from a problem known as the “metabolic rift,” in which capitalist agriculture depletes soil nutrients through intensive monocropping and fertilizing. This problem is fundamentally historical and material, and visible in the archaeological record. A manuring platform found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, offers a material vantage point through which to explore the contradictions of early capitalist agriculture. Increasing market penetration into the New England backcountry in the early nineteenth century spurred farmers to increase productivity, at the cost of sustainability. Wealthier farmers were able to capitalize on this transition, while poorer farmers were forced into wage labor or out-migration
Reviews of
Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and I... more Reviews of Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania. Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
and
Hegarty C and Wilson-North R (2014) The Archaeology of Hill Farming on Exmoor. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Forthcoming issue of Post-Medieval Archaeology (2015)
Reviews of
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: e... more Reviews of
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: excavations at Cotehouse Farm and Lawn Farm, Berryhill, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 2003-2007. Stoke-on-Trent Archaeology Service Monograph No. 3.
and
Mazrim, Robert F. (2011) At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730-1800. Studies in Archaeology No. 9, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.
Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical And Underwater Archaeology, 2018
This paper introduces the session, and as a case study, explores utopias and utopian plans inspir... more This paper introduces the session, and as a case study, explores utopias and utopian plans inspired by conservative thinking and principles as examples of spatial play and landscape experimentation. The growth of the internet has allowed for the proliferation of like-minded communities as well as the broadcasting of political ideologies and proposals. During the 2000s, anti-government enthusiasm proliferated into a number of proposals for separatist communities within the United States, founded on visions of conservatism, free-market principles, firearms enthusiasm, and more. I utilize maps, accounts, and documents to show conservative utopias as both embodying similar principles socialist or utopias. At the same time, I argue that such communities enact similar contradictions inherent in all utopias, and that the continuation of concerted conservative political growth will obviate the need for such separatist spaces.
ABSTRACT Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe ... more ABSTRACT Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe how buildings constructed as part of an eighteenth century transition to a high carbon coal-based economy, are used and understood by their current inhabitants. Applied heritage research has tended to focus on the thermal and energetic properties of historic buildings, as distinct from their social meaning and use. A similar separation between the physical building and its social use is inherent in methodologies such as energy audits that constitute key devices through which buildings are institutionally managed. We argue that these perspectives have overlooked how a significant element of energy use arises from the complex practical interactions between people and infrastructure. From this perspective we argue that better outcomes for energy and heritage would result if greater contextual consideration was given to the existing possibilities afforded by historic buildings and their users.
This paper proposes an archaeology of the Great Depression in England by an examination of one at... more This paper proposes an archaeology of the Great Depression in England by an examination of one attempt to ameliorate its effects on the landscape. The north-east of England was badly hit by the Depression of the 1930s. Although the impact on urban areas, such as Tyneside, is well known, other parts of the region suffered equally, if not more, severely. In the rural ironstone mining areas of Cleveland unemployment hit the staggering level of 91%. As an effort to ameliorate the effects of this, a local gentry couple, Major James Pennyman (1883-1961) and his wife Ruth rented some plots of uncultivated land near the villages of Margrove Park and Boosbeck to be used as a communal gardening and agricultural plot for unemployed Ironstone workers in the area. There were four plots in total: ―Heartbreak Hill‖, between Margrove Park and Boosbeck, ―Dartmoor‖ south-adjacent to Margrove Park, and ―Busky Fields‖, two plots adjacent to the pit village of Stanghow. Miners could work in the allotments, and receive payment in produce, depending upon the amount of work time they put in. The land was cleared under the organization of rural revivalist and right-wing political figure Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), who brought in university and private-school students to assist the miners in this clearance. Gardiner and Pennyman were interested in side-stepping the socialist and labour movements then prevalent in urban Teesside by rooting Heartbreak Hill in conservative and racialist assumptions about the purity of the English countryside and the landowning class system. And yet, the communal structure of labor at the camp, as well as related cultural movements that foregrounded socialist politics, including a locally produced opera about Robin Hood, meant that Heartbreak Hill was ultimately a more politically ambiguous experiment than its origins with prominent conservatives might suggest. This paper acts as prologue to a new project to explore the materiality of these sites. We intend to begin to explore the way in which the experience of unemployment and responses to it were created, mediated and constrained by the physical and social landscapes within which the participants were situated.
This paper takes an archaeological approach to the modern High Street of the town of Stockton in ... more This paper takes an archaeological approach to the modern High Street of the town of Stockton in the Northeast of England. Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, Stockton is currently undergoing a wave of urban renewal, but this is only the most recent iteration of an ongoing material and social process. Over the last two hundred years (and even farther back), Stockton has been re-made many times. A record of this urban renewal can be seen in the town's High Street, which presents a pastiche of 19th, 20th, and 21st century architecture. These remakings were materializations of the hopes, goals, and possibilities of various groups and individuals, and their struggles at multiple social, economic, and political scales. And they foreclosed and incorporated previous groups' and individuals' efforts at remaking. In this paper, I document and discuss some of the the buildings on the modern High street, with the ultimate goal of exploring the social context of urban renewal in modern and historical Stockton. Along the way, I offer some prospective thoughts about archaeologies of urban renewal, the materiality of "creative destruction" embodied in Stockton High Street, and the complex articulations of modernity, preservation, and capitalism inherent in such a materiality.
This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19 th century rural
Massachusetts. Impro... more This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19 th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18 th and 19 th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. Th meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profi and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profi and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19 th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
Th subject of this chapter is white supremacy, though not in the way that
term is usually used. R... more Th subject of this chapter is white supremacy, though not in the way that term is usually used. Rather, the focus is how, in the late nineteenth century, a group of people in the village of Deerfild, Massachusetts used objects, spaces, and historical events to assert their white identity in order to reclaim a threatened cultural and economic authority. While white supremacy was not their avowed or explicit intention, the effcts of their actions constructed Deerfild as a “white public space,” as defied by Enoch Page and R. Brooke Thmas (1994). By organizing the way histories were told and spaces were experienced, Deerfild’s Anglo descendants spatialized racial privilege through a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion. Th landscape they created excluded Native people in the region, whom they cast in historical narratives as racially undeserving of social or cultural standing. Deerfild’s white Anglo residents and newer populations of marginally white or nonwhite immigrants who pledged allegiance to the cultural and social supremacy of the town’s founders were included in this landscape of privilege. Recent effrts to decolonize Deerfild have critiqued and contextualized this landscape, but the space these Anglo antiquarians created is largely the landscape of the village today
The modern world has seen a variety of agricultural crises deriving from a
problem known as the “... more The modern world has seen a variety of agricultural crises deriving from a problem known as the “metabolic rift,” in which capitalist agriculture depletes soil nutrients through intensive monocropping and fertilizing. This problem is fundamentally historical and material, and visible in the archaeological record. A manuring platform found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, offers a material vantage point through which to explore the contradictions of early capitalist agriculture. Increasing market penetration into the New England backcountry in the early nineteenth century spurred farmers to increase productivity, at the cost of sustainability. Wealthier farmers were able to capitalize on this transition, while poorer farmers were forced into wage labor or out-migration
Reviews of
Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and I... more Reviews of Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania. Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
and
Hegarty C and Wilson-North R (2014) The Archaeology of Hill Farming on Exmoor. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Forthcoming issue of Post-Medieval Archaeology (2015)
Reviews of
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: e... more Reviews of
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: excavations at Cotehouse Farm and Lawn Farm, Berryhill, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 2003-2007. Stoke-on-Trent Archaeology Service Monograph No. 3.
and
Mazrim, Robert F. (2011) At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730-1800. Studies in Archaeology No. 9, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.
Uploads
Papers by Quentin Lewis
to ameliorate its effects on the landscape. The north-east of England was badly hit by the Depression of the
1930s. Although the impact on urban areas, such as Tyneside, is well known, other parts of the region
suffered equally, if not more, severely. In the rural ironstone mining areas of Cleveland unemployment hit
the staggering level of 91%. As an effort to ameliorate the effects of this, a local gentry couple, Major
James Pennyman (1883-1961) and his wife Ruth rented some plots of uncultivated land near the villages of
Margrove Park and Boosbeck to be used as a communal gardening and agricultural plot for unemployed
Ironstone workers in the area. There were four plots in total: ―Heartbreak Hill‖, between Margrove Park
and Boosbeck, ―Dartmoor‖ south-adjacent to Margrove Park, and ―Busky Fields‖, two plots adjacent to the
pit village of Stanghow. Miners could work in the allotments, and receive payment in produce, depending
upon the amount of work time they put in. The land was cleared under the organization of rural revivalist
and right-wing political figure Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), who brought in university and private-school
students to assist the miners in this clearance. Gardiner and Pennyman were interested in side-stepping the
socialist and labour movements then prevalent in urban Teesside by rooting Heartbreak Hill in conservative
and racialist assumptions about the purity of the English countryside and the landowning class system.
And yet, the communal structure of labor at the camp, as well as related cultural movements that
foregrounded socialist politics, including a locally produced opera about Robin Hood, meant that
Heartbreak Hill was ultimately a more politically ambiguous experiment than its origins with prominent
conservatives might suggest. This paper acts as prologue to a new project to explore the materiality of
these sites. We intend to begin to explore the way in which the experience of unemployment and responses
to it were created, mediated and constrained by the physical and social landscapes within which the
participants were situated.
Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, Stockton is currently undergoing a wave of urban renewal, but this is only the
most recent iteration of an ongoing material and social process. Over the last two hundred years (and even farther back),
Stockton has been re-made many times. A record of this urban renewal can be seen in the town's High Street, which presents
a pastiche of 19th, 20th, and 21st century architecture. These remakings were materializations of the hopes, goals, and
possibilities of various groups and individuals, and their struggles at multiple social, economic, and political scales. And they
foreclosed and incorporated previous groups' and individuals' efforts at remaking. In this paper, I document and discuss some
of the the buildings on the modern High street, with the ultimate goal of exploring the social context of urban renewal in
modern and historical Stockton. Along the way, I offer some prospective thoughts about archaeologies of urban renewal, the
materiality of "creative destruction" embodied in Stockton High Street, and the complex articulations of modernity,
preservation, and capitalism inherent in such a materiality.
Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic
changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18 th and 19 th centuries as
part of a transition to industrial capitalism. Th meaning of Improvement vacillated
between ideas of economic profi and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement
relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction.
Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western
Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications,
this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profi and betterment unfolded
unevenly across early 19 th century New England. The Improvement movement in
Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate
growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization
of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural
landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global
capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed
wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
term is usually used. Rather, the focus is how, in the late nineteenth century, a
group of people in the village of Deerfild, Massachusetts used objects, spaces,
and historical events to assert their white identity in order to reclaim a threatened cultural and economic authority. While white supremacy was not their
avowed or explicit intention, the effcts of their actions constructed Deerfild
as a “white public space,” as defied by Enoch Page and R. Brooke Thmas
(1994). By organizing the way histories were told and spaces were experienced,
Deerfild’s Anglo descendants spatialized racial privilege through a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion. Th landscape they created excluded Native
people in the region, whom they cast in historical narratives as racially undeserving of social or cultural standing. Deerfild’s white Anglo residents and
newer populations of marginally white or nonwhite immigrants who pledged
allegiance to the cultural and social supremacy of the town’s founders were
included in this landscape of privilege. Recent effrts to decolonize Deerfild
have critiqued and contextualized this landscape, but the space these Anglo
antiquarians created is largely the landscape of the village today
problem known as the “metabolic rift,” in which capitalist agriculture depletes soil
nutrients through intensive monocropping and fertilizing. This problem is fundamentally historical and material, and visible in the archaeological record. A manuring
platform found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, offers a material vantage point through
which to explore the contradictions of early capitalist agriculture. Increasing market
penetration into the New England backcountry in the early nineteenth century spurred
farmers to increase productivity, at the cost of sustainability. Wealthier farmers were
able to capitalize on this transition, while poorer farmers were forced into wage labor or
out-migration
Book Reviews by Quentin Lewis
Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania. Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
and
Hegarty C and Wilson-North R (2014) The Archaeology of Hill Farming on Exmoor. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Forthcoming issue of Post-Medieval Archaeology (2015)
Saitta, D. J. (2007) The Archaeology of Collective Action University Press of Florida.
and
Smith, A. and Gazin-Schwartz, A. eds. (2008) Landscapes of Clearance: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives Left Coast Press.
for
Post Medieval Archaeology 47:2. (2013)
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: excavations at Cotehouse Farm and Lawn Farm, Berryhill, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 2003-2007. Stoke-on-Trent Archaeology Service Monograph No. 3.
and
Mazrim, Robert F. (2011) At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730-1800. Studies in Archaeology No. 9, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.
in Post-Medieval Archaeology 48:3. (2014)
to ameliorate its effects on the landscape. The north-east of England was badly hit by the Depression of the
1930s. Although the impact on urban areas, such as Tyneside, is well known, other parts of the region
suffered equally, if not more, severely. In the rural ironstone mining areas of Cleveland unemployment hit
the staggering level of 91%. As an effort to ameliorate the effects of this, a local gentry couple, Major
James Pennyman (1883-1961) and his wife Ruth rented some plots of uncultivated land near the villages of
Margrove Park and Boosbeck to be used as a communal gardening and agricultural plot for unemployed
Ironstone workers in the area. There were four plots in total: ―Heartbreak Hill‖, between Margrove Park
and Boosbeck, ―Dartmoor‖ south-adjacent to Margrove Park, and ―Busky Fields‖, two plots adjacent to the
pit village of Stanghow. Miners could work in the allotments, and receive payment in produce, depending
upon the amount of work time they put in. The land was cleared under the organization of rural revivalist
and right-wing political figure Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971), who brought in university and private-school
students to assist the miners in this clearance. Gardiner and Pennyman were interested in side-stepping the
socialist and labour movements then prevalent in urban Teesside by rooting Heartbreak Hill in conservative
and racialist assumptions about the purity of the English countryside and the landowning class system.
And yet, the communal structure of labor at the camp, as well as related cultural movements that
foregrounded socialist politics, including a locally produced opera about Robin Hood, meant that
Heartbreak Hill was ultimately a more politically ambiguous experiment than its origins with prominent
conservatives might suggest. This paper acts as prologue to a new project to explore the materiality of
these sites. We intend to begin to explore the way in which the experience of unemployment and responses
to it were created, mediated and constrained by the physical and social landscapes within which the
participants were situated.
Despite the unfavorable economic conditions, Stockton is currently undergoing a wave of urban renewal, but this is only the
most recent iteration of an ongoing material and social process. Over the last two hundred years (and even farther back),
Stockton has been re-made many times. A record of this urban renewal can be seen in the town's High Street, which presents
a pastiche of 19th, 20th, and 21st century architecture. These remakings were materializations of the hopes, goals, and
possibilities of various groups and individuals, and their struggles at multiple social, economic, and political scales. And they
foreclosed and incorporated previous groups' and individuals' efforts at remaking. In this paper, I document and discuss some
of the the buildings on the modern High street, with the ultimate goal of exploring the social context of urban renewal in
modern and historical Stockton. Along the way, I offer some prospective thoughts about archaeologies of urban renewal, the
materiality of "creative destruction" embodied in Stockton High Street, and the complex articulations of modernity,
preservation, and capitalism inherent in such a materiality.
Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic
changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18 th and 19 th centuries as
part of a transition to industrial capitalism. Th meaning of Improvement vacillated
between ideas of economic profi and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement
relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction.
Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western
Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications,
this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profi and betterment unfolded
unevenly across early 19 th century New England. The Improvement movement in
Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate
growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization
of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural
landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global
capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed
wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.
term is usually used. Rather, the focus is how, in the late nineteenth century, a
group of people in the village of Deerfild, Massachusetts used objects, spaces,
and historical events to assert their white identity in order to reclaim a threatened cultural and economic authority. While white supremacy was not their
avowed or explicit intention, the effcts of their actions constructed Deerfild
as a “white public space,” as defied by Enoch Page and R. Brooke Thmas
(1994). By organizing the way histories were told and spaces were experienced,
Deerfild’s Anglo descendants spatialized racial privilege through a dialectic of exclusion and inclusion. Th landscape they created excluded Native
people in the region, whom they cast in historical narratives as racially undeserving of social or cultural standing. Deerfild’s white Anglo residents and
newer populations of marginally white or nonwhite immigrants who pledged
allegiance to the cultural and social supremacy of the town’s founders were
included in this landscape of privilege. Recent effrts to decolonize Deerfild
have critiqued and contextualized this landscape, but the space these Anglo
antiquarians created is largely the landscape of the village today
problem known as the “metabolic rift,” in which capitalist agriculture depletes soil
nutrients through intensive monocropping and fertilizing. This problem is fundamentally historical and material, and visible in the archaeological record. A manuring
platform found in Deerfield, Massachusetts, offers a material vantage point through
which to explore the contradictions of early capitalist agriculture. Increasing market
penetration into the New England backcountry in the early nineteenth century spurred
farmers to increase productivity, at the cost of sustainability. Wealthier farmers were
able to capitalize on this transition, while poorer farmers were forced into wage labor or
out-migration
Galaty ML, Lafe O, Lee WE and Tafilica Z eds (2013) Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania. Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
and
Hegarty C and Wilson-North R (2014) The Archaeology of Hill Farming on Exmoor. Swindon, England: English Heritage.
Forthcoming issue of Post-Medieval Archaeology (2015)
Saitta, D. J. (2007) The Archaeology of Collective Action University Press of Florida.
and
Smith, A. and Gazin-Schwartz, A. eds. (2008) Landscapes of Clearance: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives Left Coast Press.
for
Post Medieval Archaeology 47:2. (2013)
Boothroyd, Noel (2009) ‘A small liberty… of scattered farm-houses and collieries’: excavations at Cotehouse Farm and Lawn Farm, Berryhill, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 2003-2007. Stoke-on-Trent Archaeology Service Monograph No. 3.
and
Mazrim, Robert F. (2011) At Home in the Illinois Country: French Colonial Domestic Site Archaeology in the Midwest 1730-1800. Studies in Archaeology No. 9, Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.
in Post-Medieval Archaeology 48:3. (2014)