RUI: The Process of Rural Industrialization

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

The rise of American industry during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries dramatically transformed the United States. Researchers who study early industrial communities wish to understand how physical, economic, demographic, and social factors intersected in the unfolding of industrialization. Archaeology is particularly well placed to provide relevant insight because it can trace trajectories of cultural change over extended periods of time.

Archaeology also can recover material evidence of the countless men and women who, though lost to the history books, helped America become an industrial and economic power. Rather than focus on giants of industry or the industrial development of cities, this project will examine how industrialization resonated in small communities, transforming work and domestic life.

This research will generate new data for understanding the contexts and consequences of industrialization in the past and how industrialization continues to transform the world in the present. The project will facilitate comparative research on how local communities experience and engage with wider flows of people, technology, commodities, and ideas.

Additionally, the project will provide opportunities for secondary school students, teachers, and scout troops to learn about the history in their backyards through participation in archaeological research. The research team will also install museum exhibits detailing the research at the heritage centers in Stoddartsville and Joanna Furnace. Finally, the project will provide undergraduate students with an opportunity to participate in archaeological fieldwork, artifact analysis, and public outreach.

A larger number of undergraduate students will benefit from exposure to this archaeological research through university courses. This project at a primarily undergraduate institution will provide a unique opportunity for students, many of whom are first-generation college students from populations that are underrepresented in the sciences, to collaborate on research and pursue the presentation of these data.

The research team will examine the myriad changes wrought by industrialization through the archaeological study of two nineteenth-century industrial communities in Pennsylvania. Comparative study of environmental data and historic and material records from these industrial communities will allow the research team to examine (a) the varying ways in which physical features intersected with cultural and historical factors to define the economic and extractive activities of these communities; and (b) the intersecting changes in demographic composition, economic organization, and social formations that resulted from the industrial postures adopted by these communities.

Archaeological fieldwork conducted during the project will focus on the identification and excavation of domestic contexts, augmenting previous fieldwork focused on community structures and work sites. By documenting variability in the consumption of commodities, the research team will be able to examine how different social groups participated in or resisted industrialization and how industrialization itself may have contributed to an emergent American ethnicity.

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.