Modern celebrities foreshadowed in the ancient Mediterranean

These were posted on Neatorama and are doing the rounds. I couldn't resist. I really have no pride.

Obviously we have The King here. As far as the actual object goes, I have no idea what I am looking at, but that is an honest-to-god D.A. .

Jacko himself, right down to the nose.

Archaeology, company towns, and consensus history

I have many voices in my head, but the one that asks "why is 'class' a dirty word?" over and over is one of the loudest. This little article in the Chicago Tribune set that voice off.

Students search for 'Old Chicago' in Pullman neighborhood.
It is about a field school excavating the 1880s shopping arcade in the former company town of Pullman (now part of Chicago). That it is an 1880s arcade is interesting in itself (although I am not sure what the archaeology will contribute other than illustrative knick knacks), but the Pullman connection is what caught my attention.

Pullman was the company town for the workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, who manufactured, yes, Pullman cars (on which, incidentally, one found Pullman porters). Pullman was the very model of a model company town, quite an early experiment in corporate paternalism. George Pullman was a firm and early believer that labor struggle was the result of an unpleasant environment, writing

that such advantages and surroundings made better workmen by removing from them the feeling of discontent and desire for change which so generally characterize the American workman; thus protecting the employer from loss of time and money consequent upon intemperance, labor strikes, and dissatisfaction which generally result from poverty and uncongenial home surroundings.

He apparently spared no expense--the town was formally laid out and had all the amenities, including the shopping arcade. And the Pullman company maintained iron control over their workers' lives.

The workers never forgot that, however nice the houses in Pullman were, they were not their houses--"We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell." In 1894, Pullman was the epicenter of the Pullman or American Railroad Union (ARU) Strike. To make a long and interesting story short and boring, Federal troops were called out, the ARU was broken, and its president, Eugene Debs, did jail time. It was this strike that launched Debs on his political career and helped make the Socialist Party a genuine, but very brief, threat in the 1912 election.

So that's Pullman--a powder keg of class antagonism, but a very nicely painted one.

None of that was even hinted at in this article.

Foundation [the Historic Pullman Foundation] President Michael Shymanski said the arcade once was a place where executives and laborers shopped together, and that equality was emblematic of the town's ideals of living in harmony.
...
"Everything was big, beautiful, ornate," Baxter said. "This was the place everyone in Pullman came, which is why it's so interesting to us."

Whoa.

Now admittedly the article is very brief and reporters do have a tendency to rephrase things they don't understand into thing they do understand. So I am not sure what was really said or intended, but these two quotes really made me wonder what was going here. Why was the company town history of Pullman not mentioned?

What are some possibilities?

1. The archaeology and the foundation are probably part of neighborhood revitalization (read gentrification). There may be marketing and image reasons not to highlight the darker aspects of Pullman's history--yuppies, like archaeologists, love ethnic, but they do NOT like unions and strikes.
2. It may just be the usual US middle-class-professional obliviousness to class--the ingrained idea that there is a natural harmony of interests between capital and labor. And here that harmony is apparently expressed through consumerism...in an early mall too, thus we are doubly, maybe even triply, blessed.
3. Another is that nobody wanted to get too controversial with the reporter, certain kinds of historical facts being inherently controversial.
4. Or, most likely, the reporter just selectively picked the happy quotes. Even then it still highlights the weird fugue state middle-class Americans go into when the "C" word comes up.

Northern California fires

The was the scene on 101 in Mendocino County last weekend. I haven't actually seen any fires, but the smoke has been incredible.

NPR podcasts--The Geopolitics of Archaeology

Chicago Public Radio has a series of podcasts up titled The Geopolitics of Archaeology.

The accompanying blurb is:

We explore the politics swirling around the fields of archaeology, anthropology and history. We’ll dig up the forgotten roots of “Western Civilization,” and we’ll find out what happens when stolen antiquities end up in museums and universities. You’ll hear the voices of scholars you won’t hear anywhere else as we explore a new model of archaeology looking past imperial, national and ethno-centric worldviews to explore our shared heritage.

The segments are:

• Biblical Archaeology --Sandra Scham
  
• Repatriation of Native American Remains and Artifacts -- Tamara Bray
• Global Market for Stolen Antiquities -- Neil Brodie and Richard Leventhal
• Stolen Antiquities and the Law -- Patty Gerstenblith
• The Origins of Western Civilization (2 Parts)-- Martin Bernal
• Archaeological Tourism's Effect on People and Heritage -- Lynn Meskell
• Creating a New Paradigm for Archaeology -- Phil Duke and Yannis Hamilakis

So far I've listened to Repatriation, Biblical Archaeology, and The New Paradigm ones. I liked the Biblical archaeology one. Especially timely after the Nadia Abu El Haj lynchfest. Sandra Scham is the editor of a forthcoming book Forgotten Past: Reader in the Archaeology of Palestine by Palestinians. That'll go on the wishlist. The repatriation one was a bit bland and measured (I suppose that shouldn't be a criticism), but it covered the main bases. Phil and Yannis Hamilakis didn't pull any punches, but I am not sure how it would come across to the average non-archaeologist. It was also a bit disappointing that the big example of a politically-engaged archaeology was working with neopagans at Stonehenge. But they did have a good critique of CRM and its facade of apoliticism.

"Slum" archaeology in York

Current Archaeology has a nice article (The archaeology of modern poverty) on the archaeological project at Hungate, which will apparently be the largest project undertaken in York for the past 25 years. Not too shabby for a 19th- and early 20th-century urban working class neighbourhood (read "slum"). One nice thing, the archaeologists seem to be well over the idea of an undifferentiated working-class "blob" and are seeing distinctions within the neighborhood. At this stage the differences are in architecture, which is probably the first thing you will pick up on during fieldwork, but it will be interesting to see how the analysis goes.

The archaeologists are really fortunate in that Hungate was part of a seminal 1899-1901survey of urban porverty by Benjamin Rowntree (of the chocolate Rowntrees).

During his 1899 York survey (the first of three), investigators visited every working class home in the city, making records on 11,560 families or 46,754 individuals. Rowntree established a measure of poverty in terms of a minimum weekly sum of money ‘necessary to enable families … to secure the minimum necessaries of a healthy life’. These included fuel, lighting, rent, food, clothing, and household and personal items, according to family size.

The critical thing for Rowntree was whether income was sufficient to ensure the minimum calorific intake and nutritional balance necessary to avoid illness or weight-loss. According to this measure, 27.84% of the total population of York lived below ‘the poverty line’ (a concept Rowntree invented). Of these, 9.91% lived in ‘primary poverty’, which meant they lacked the income to meet basic needs, and 17.73% in ‘secondary poverty’, which meant that income was sufficient but too much was being spent on other things. A subtlety of Rowntree’s analysis was his appreciation that people tended to move in and out of poverty during their lives, often being poor in early childhood or old age, but better-off when of working age – an observation which gave rise to his concept of ‘the poverty cycle’.

I hadn't heard of the Rowntree survey, but have just become the proud possessor of a 13.4meg PDF of the book courtesy of Google Books (As far as I am concerned Google can have my private information--it's not interesting and they earn it repeatedly). I will read it IMCFT.

Somewhere I also have Margaret Byington's 1910 study of Homestead (Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town). I picked it up to try and get some idea of diet, rent, and household budgeting and priorities. It's a pity I wasn't working in Pittsburgh at the time or even in a steeltown, but it still gave me a lot to think about with the assemblages I was dealing with. These late 19th/early 20th-century middle-class reformers are easily sneered at, especially, as I found, when they are women. But they weren't idiots, and the quantitative information they sometimes gathered is astonishing. Of course all the usual caveats about source criticism apply. Regardless, I don't think there is anything on the scale of Rowntree's study in the US.

The Hungate work looks like one of those cases where the more historical documentation there is, the more the archaeology has to contribute.

And this is another case where a comparison between UK and US working class conditions would be (a) feasible and (b) probably eye-opening.

Byington, Margaret

1910 Homestead: the Households of a Mill Town. New York: Arno and the New York Times.

Rowntree, Benjamin Seebohm

1908 Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London: Macmillan.

Labor archaeology

I just finished reading James Green's Taking History to Heart. For some reason I've been reading more personal accounts melding some sort of Left politics and history (and archaeology). Part of the reason is that engagements over public history tend to have a personal flavor that is hard, or even inappropriate, to convey in an academic article. Debates and outcomes have as much to do with quirks of individual biography and personalities as they do with large-scale social processes. That actually comes through better in more informal narratives.

Anyhow, James Green is labor historian who a long history of public engagement, particularly in regards to the labor movement. Among other things, he was involved in the creation of the National Park Service Labor History Theme Study. His encounter with the NRHP Criteria and Integrity certainly got some sympathetic noises from me. But one paragraph that struck me, and would strike any archaeologist was the following:

A survey of potential labor history labor history landmarks for the National Park Service included few extant sites that could signify the lives of these forgotten men and women who toiled in the fields and the factories, the mines and mills that produced the region's wealth.

Few of these structures survived and even fewer were preserved for their national significance or architectural value. Workers passed through the coal and textile towns, the turpentine and timber camps, the dockyard and railyard districts leaving few material traces of their lives.Long gone are the storefront meeting halls and the holiness chapels were workers congregated, "the unsteepled places" they made "their own" and where there was room for free voices to discuss "democratic experiments,"as E.P. Thompson once put it.

It is easier to find places where they died and were buried than places where they lived, worked, and associated. (p.151)

Any archaeologist (well, any historical archaeologist) would sit up straight on reading this; "Whaddaya MEAN 'few extant sites'?! I done DOZENS of those sites!" Yes...and no. Labor history is obviously something to which archaeology can make a real contribution. This quote makes that clear. However as a group we are not well-equipped , or even particularly interested in, in addressing labor. Labor history is a whole new kind of history we don't have time to learn about. "Talk about consumer choice and call it good." This is changing, there are more archaeologists looking at workers as workers these days, and even saying the "C" word. But the real action on these sites will come from CRM (let's face it, I don't see the NSF or NEH funding the archaeology of 19th- and 20th-century labor sites anytime soon) and that is where the sea-change needs to happen

Green, James R.

2000 Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Archaeologists on strike

I dropped the ball on this one, but the Museum of London Archaeological Services (MoLAS) workers staged a one-day strike on the 9th.

A June 5th press release announcing the strike is on the Past Horizons' Weblog .

A letter from Anthony Francis, the Chair of the MoLAS branch of Prospect was posted on the British Archaeological Jobs and Resources Forum on the 12th, and I've quoted some relevant sections.

This was the first time the Museum's archaeology service (MoLAS) has ever gone on strike and the first time a strike has extended across the entire Museum of London group. The strike was over our pay award for the last financial year. It was 13 months late and less than half the rate of current RPI inflation. Ironically, our employer has the money to pay us more and wants to pay us more, but their hands have been tied by the government's 2% pay cap.
...
The strike closed at least ten MoLAS sites across the capital, including three sites where the entire archaeological workforce joined the union and went on strike. The few sites that did open did so with a much reduced workforce. A picket line was maintained at MoLAS HQ at Mortimer Wheeler House in Hackney where executive management contracted in extra (non-unionised) security to guard what was virtually an empty building.
....
After the rally, many union members went to the TUC ' Speak up for public services event at Westminster. There we heard that there are hundreds of thousands of workers in the same boat as us, worried about housing costs, the cost of food and travel and also subject to below-inflation pay awards. The big unions are galvanising for further strike action later in the year against poverty pay . It is a fight for us all.

The full letter is here.

This reminded me of the nasty 1998 Indiana State University/Caesar's casino strike. So I went hunting through the HISTARCH archives. I found a couple of things, but I know there is more out there in the various listserv archives. Someday I'd like to write something up on that strike; something like that deserves to be remembered.

Field Tech Picket Shuts Down Caesars/ISU Site

Massive Firings on Ceasars/ISU Project!

Although the United Archaeological Field Technicians (UAFT) seems to be pretty much defunct, there have been rumblings to revitalize the field tech union, which I hope come through. While they were going, the UAFT put the fear of god into the CRM industry, but my sense is that those lessons are being forgotten. I am sure you can insert insert your own long rant about sleazy companies here.

In solidarity.