Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era.

Johnson, Matthew

It is currently fashionable to call for a 'world historical archaeology'. Such an archaeology proposes that our concerns must look at cultural systems from the scale of the local to the global, and deals primarily with the period after 1450. It is an exciting development for several reasons. First, it offers the opportunity for previously rather insular traditions to communicate on a world stage. Many such calls have come via the forum of the World Archaeological Congress (Funari et al. forthcoming). Second, many of the themes that might unite different strands of such a global movement - the 'rise of capitalism', of the structures of colonial contact and exploitation, and of the construction of modern identities and modernity in general - offer an opportunity to build an exciting theoretical base. These themes do so, moreover, in an area of archaeology whose discourse has previously been dominated by highly particularist, often 'pre-processual' approaches.

Such themes, of course, have been dealt with before in archaeological writing, though often implicitly. Most notably, the reworking by Mark Leone and his students of the archaeology of the Georgian Order has linked patterning in material culture to the ideologies of mercantile capitalism (Leone 1988; Shackel 1993). The success of such work, and that of related North American schools (cf. the studies in McGuire & Paynter 1991) has meant that until quite recently theoretically aware and wide-ranging historical archaeology has been synonymous with North American studies. What is new, then, in the call for a global historical archaeology is the insistence that they be dealt with on a comparative and world-wide scale. It is surely no coincidence that this new stress has gone hand-in-hand with the development of theoretically aware historical archaeologies in parts of the world other than North America (Funari et al. forthcoming).

The call to work on such a scale is laudable, but holds a series of potential tensions in store for the archaeologist proposing to work in this area. The first is that between global and particular; feel for the local context might be lost. The second is that between the urge to write one grand narrative and the argued need for a proliferation of narratives; in defining historical archaeology around certain themes, the importance of those themes as structuring principles for research will be assumed rather than argued through. Other stories about the past built around other ways of looking at the world are possible and many archaeologists, this reviewer included, would encourage the development of these.

These are some of the issues to be tackled in the undoubtedly grand and certainly courageous new monograph series Contributions to Global Historical Archaeology, edited by Charles Orser himself. Orser's Preface to the series states: 'the thrust of the series will be to explore topical, methodological, and comparative questions in historical archaeology'. The two books reviewed here perform this task very well and form an excellent start to the series.

Orser's wide-ranging and ambitious book tackles head-on some of the problems raised above. He characterizes historical archaeology as the meeting-place of four 'haunts': those of colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity. Each is defined and discussed at some length without unnecessary schematization.

At the same time, the tension between global and local forces is negotiated skillfully. Orser adopts a 'mutualist' perspective derived from the work of the anthropologist Michael Carrithers (1992) in which the focus is on people and their actions rather than culture as an abstracted entity. It is not clear from Orser's account of Carrithers what insight is gained by this perspective that we are not already familiar with through, for example, structuration theory, but Orser's exposition is clear and convincing nevertheless. He goes on to explore the interaction between global and local by concentration on and comparison between two case studies, Palmares in Brazil and Gorttoose in Ireland. Orser's style is clear and readable, and his interpretations avoid the more mechanistic feel of some of the studies in this area.

Orser's criteria for the definition of such an archaeology are shifting. There is a tension here between time period, method and theme that is explicitly discussed; Orser comes down in favour of a thematic approach in which the historical archaeologist studies modern times (p. 28), though this does, he feel, overlap with a temporal definition based on a post-1492 date. Old World archaeologists will sympathize with Orser's desire to keep at bay (with apologies to David Clarke) the murky exhalation that passes for interpretation in much of Classical and early and high medieval archaeology. They will not, however, wish to rule these earlier historical periods out entirely. Of Orser's haunts, colonialism and Eurocentrism are practices that can trace their genealogies back to the Roman world, as recent exciting work by a minority of Romanists has pointed out (Webster & Cooper 1996).

It is also impossible to explain many of the enduring structures of post-medieval landscape and culture without reference back to their medieval antecedents. Even Michel Foucault traces many of the practices he sees as constitutive of 'panoptic society' back to the medieval monasteries. Five centuries is too short a time-frame within which to consider the origins of the modern world - as Orser himself implies in his comments on medieval archaeology in the final chapter.

My reservations with this otherwise excellent book lie with Orser's data. Orser structures much of his discussion around two places: Palmares, in Brazil, and Gorttoose, in Ireland. I know little of post-medieval Ireland, but even less of Brazil, so let us concentrate on the former. There are no references to the tension around 'revisionism' that has existed within Irish historical scholarship since the 1930s, though this is central to the themes Orser draws from this secondary literature. Gerry Adams is cited as representative of Irish nationalism without further comment or qualification (p. 93). Gorttoose, the centre of Orser's field project, was spelt inconsistently in the 17th century (p. 91), but it does not betoken confidence when we find it spelt inconsistently in Orser's text eight pages later. It would have been difficult for Gaelic chiefdoms (surely chieftains?) to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth after 1635 (p. 94), as she had been dead for over 30 years by that date. Orser is still in a different league from, for example, Sir Roy Strong's recent glossing-over to the point of denial of English colonialism in Ireland (1996), but if Orser's subalterns want to really cut the ground from under right-wing elitists like Strong, a little more subtlety and detail is required.

More serious here is a lurking essentialism that Orser would decry if deployed in other colonial contexts. A farmer 'embodies rural Ireland . . . a quiet, deeply religious man . . . he projects a quiet strength and a deep understanding of the Irish soil' (p. 89). The Celts are treated as 'the first great conquerors . . . coming in several waves' (p. 92). Orser appears unaware that the image he invokes of an emerald isle of 'mysterious bogs, the rolling, green hills, and the craggy mountains [that] were once free from colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity' (p. 105) is a complex creation of Anglo-Irish literature of the 19th century and is thus itself a highly problematic artefact of colonialism (Cairns & Richards 1988). Postcolonial archaeology needs to catch up with postcolonial literary criticism here, it seems.

We encounter the tension between global and local again with Paul Shackel. Despite its broad title, Shackel's Culture change and the new technology turns out actually to be an account of a single site: the town and national armoury at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Shackel reviews the history of Harpers Ferry from its 18th-century origins through its most famous appearance in history as the location of John Brown's ill-fated raid in 1859 to the modern creation of the Harpers Ferry National Park. The story is told clearly and accessibly, and with some style.

Shackel ties this narrative together with a series of archaeological investigations, focusing on the topography of the developing settlement and armoury, the meanings of the 'built landscape', and excavations of the workers' households. I found the use of so-called 'environmental data' to be particularly exciting, enabling Shackel to address the changing appearance of factory and garden landscapes as well as the diet of worker's households. Historical archaeology, with its closely defined and dated contexts, offers a unique opportunity to look beyond 'environment' into the meanings of things being planted and consumed; Shackel does this skillfully, drawing instructive contrasts between factory and domestic landscapes.

Though this is a study of one town, the wider relevance of this study is great. It is the best example I have read of a theoretically informed approach to 'industrial archaeology', and as such deserves to be read by industrial archaeologists everywhere. Most encouraging in this respect is Shackel's insistence that the archaeology of the armoury be placed alongside that of the worker's households. This contextual approach avoids the dryness and sheer distance from everyday reality that characterizes countless traditional accounts of industrial techniques - it puts the people back into the Industrial Revolution. As Shackel comments (p. 144), 'emulation, social separation, consciously or unconsciously participating in a new industrial culture, and subscribing to the new Romantic ideal are all variables that need to be considered' by the archaeologist of the industrial period, not just the typology of steam turbines.

Shackel's explicitly theoretical approach is to be applauded; I do have problems, however, with some of the specific theories Shackel adopts. Shackel discusses Colin Campbell's (1987) thesis of links between consumerism and the Romantic ethic, and this is a useful antidote to many of the production-centred theoretical discussions of the Industrial Revolution in the past. It comes across, however, as a little shallow; reliance on one sociologist alone does not a new archaeological movement make. Chandra Mukerji's crucial work on materialism, for example, is neither referenced nor discussed; nor is much of the recent literature on consumption beyond the seminal but now out-of-date McKendrick, Brewer & Plumb (1982). In particular, it is not clear from Shackel's account that there was actually a diversity of late 18th- and early 19th-century 'Romanticisms' with a corresponding diversity of cultural meanings and associated ethics. I liked the links drawn between landscape and industry (pp. 1069), though they could have been strengthened with reference to international data, for example the carefully constructed landscape and architecture of socialist Robert Owen's Utopian project at New Lanark in Scotland.

There are a number of errors of detail that detract from the overall picture. I and a number of colleagues searched in vain for the mansard roofs claimed to be in the centre of figure 2, and without a knowledge of the American Civil War the reader will not be aware that the Sharpsburg of figure 8 is the same place as the Antietam of p. 45. Weber did not posit the Protestant Ethic as a 'prime mover of the industrial consciousness' (p. 12); he explicitly characterized it as one side of a many-sided causal chain. It isn't clear whether figure 33, a 'standardised plan for armoury worker's dwellings', is an abstraction from a 19th-century plan or from surviving dwellings (if the latter, which ones? how many? etc). There is no location map that is readily intelligible to a non-American audience, surely a serious omission in a volume styling itself a 'global contribution'.

One of the most encouraging aspects of Shackel's book is its demonstration that theoretically sophisticated and openly controversial archaeology can be done within the framework of the management structure of a 'professional' organization such as a National Park. Historical archaeologists in Europe are more often than not employed in government organizations and museums rather than enjoying the relative academic freedom of universities, and this has been one of the contributing factors to its theoretical conservatism. Shackel is explicitly critical of past National Park policy, making a refreshing change from the self-serving accounts that some British organizations produce from time to time (most notably recent accounts of the National Trust that are too uncritical to qualify as 'histories' and the smug response to one recent critique: Weideger 1994). Many times in the last decade I have had European archaeologists complain privately to me: 'I'd love to do more exciting things, but my museum/local authority/English Heritage bosses insist on keeping to a more orthodox line . . .'. It's a moot point whether the sense of intellectual liveliness that is present in this book is down to Shackel's determination to see his vision into print or the relative liberality and far-sightedness of his employers; probably a combination of both. The point is that with effort and imagination it can be done. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

If much of the above discussion seems overly critical of both Shackel and Orser, it is because they both have the courage to take on some of the big questions facing historical archaeology. Further, they do so not just through abstract critique, but through a close linkage between theory and practice, between wide issues and the minutiae of archaeological material. In the process of so doing, they raise a series of contentious theoretical and empirical issues that will not lie down, and will be sources of productive tension in archaeology for decades to come. I strongly encourage people to read, and to argue with, these books and with the series as it develops.

References

CAIRNS, D. & S. RICHARDS. 1988. Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CAMPBELL, C. 1987. The Romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.

CARRITHERS, M. 1992. Why humans have cultures: explaining anthropology and cultural diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

FUNARI, P., M. HALL & S. JONES (ed.). Forthcoming. Back from the edge: archaeology in history. London: Routledge.

LEONE, M. 1988. The Georgian Order as the order of capitalism in Annapolis, Maryland, in M. Leone & P. Potter (ed.), The recovery of meaning in historical archaeology: 235-62. Washington (DC): Smithsonian Institution.

McGUIRE, R. & R. PAYNTER (ed.). 1991. The archaeology of inequality. Oxford: Blackwell.

MCKENDRICK, N., J. BREWER & J.H. PLUMB. 1982. The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of 18th-century England. London: Hutchinson.

SHACKEL, P. 1993. Personal discipline and material culture: an archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695-1870. Knoxville (TN): University of Tennessee Press.

STRONG, R. 1996. The story of Britain. London: Thames & Hudson.

WEBSTER, J. & N. COOPER. 1996. Roman imperialism: post-colonial perspectives. Leicester: University of Leicester. Leicester Archaeology Monographs 3.

WEIDEGER, P. 1994. Gilding the acorn: a critical history of the National Trust. London: Simon & Schuster.