An Archaeology Of Industry And Inter-Ethnic Dynamics

Scientists will conduct archaeological and ethnohistorical research to explore the relationship between industry and rebellion in the nineteenth-century American Southwest. The project investigates the cultural factors behind the destruction of a massive industrial operation at the hands of insurgents opposed to the recent annexation of the region by the United States.

Previous archaeological studies of industrial-era labor in the region tend to anatomize moments of violent class conflict, while industrial studies across the United States typically work to refine typologies of resistance for the period more generally. This project breaks new ground by addressing the question of insurgent motivation, approaching the architecture of the industrial operation as an actor in the process, shaping patterns of raw materials consumption, human resource use, and industrial waste disposal.

Associated field and laboratory research will create opportunities for descendant and local community engagement, encouraging the co-production of anthropological knowledge and enriching the education of student participants. The project will serve as a model for the employment of High Impact Practices among underserved student populations by including undergraduate students from a Hispanic Serving Institution in collaborative research with various local elders and high school students.

Laborers at the industrial operation site milled much of the region’s wheat and manufactured enormous volumes of whiskey during the seventeen years the site was in operation. That work produced cultural, natural, and economic ripple effects in the region that may have played some role in the site’s selection for destruction by rebels. Researchers will work to improve anthropological and historical understandings of the outfit’s efforts by surveying the site and its surrounds, analyzing industrial, architectural, and other materials recovered in associated excavation, and by carrying out relevant experiments in architectural energetics.

They will address questions regarding the degree to which human and natural resources were used in construction and day-to-day operations at the site, comparing the relative volumes of labor, water, and wood consumed in relation to those of nearby farming, ranching, and industrial outfits as indicated by documentary evidence. The project brings together the methodological and analytical techniques of historical archaeology, experimental archaeology, and ethnohistory to describe aspects of the operation likeliest to produce resource strain and exacerbate local inequalities.

In the process, the project will develop a new method by which archaeologists and other researchers may come to understand the relationship between industry and rebellion in the American Southwest.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.