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.