Man Camps: The Poster

Next Saturday, I am sending a poster to a Community Connect Forum in Buffalo, ND as part of the team studying the social and cultural changes associated with the Bakken Oil Boom. This poster will present some of our work on man camps in Williams County. These forums are meant to foster communication and a sense of community between researchers at UND and residents of the state. So, it’s a great opportunity to show our work to people who might be more directly impacted by the oil boom and changes in settlement.

This means that over a two week period, I’ll be presenting something in Buffalo, ND and Buffalo, NY. I’m not really sure whether this is cool or not, but it’s going to happen.

So here’s the poster:

I’ve uploaded a legible version of the poster here. I rarely make posters, although they are becoming more and more common in academic settings. I probably used too much text and could have done more with my images, but hopefully it presents some idea of our recent work.

The Community Connect forum will also feature the world premiere of Kathy Coudle-King’s documentary Off the Map. I mention this because it was edited in the Working Group in Digital and New Media lab. While community outreach has never been the highest priority for the Working Group (nor is it something that we’ve particularly avoided), it is cool to see two Working Group members presenting in Buffalo.

So, if you’re in Buffalo, ND, check out our poster and the other cool stuff going on in the state.

North Dakota Work Camps: Some Preliminary Thoughts

Over the last three days I’ve laid out a typology of North Dakota Work Camps (and successfully killed my page view counts for the entire week). I have tried to be as formal  as possible and keep my analysis somewhat separate from these description. In the spirit of this blog, however, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some preliminary interpretations of these camps. Much of my interpretations here owe something to Paul Shackel’s excellent little book, The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life (2009).

So, in my tradition of poorly composed lists, here are five things:

1. Docile Bodies. The most uniform, Type 1, style camps have much in common with company towns and the neatly arranged and carefully monitored mining camps of the late 19th and early 20th century. These camps and towns had both utopian aspirations in that they sought to produce a space that would enforce idealized social and economic relationships. The arrangement of the spaces and the utopian supporting them sought, in part, to create docile bodies among the men and women who labored in the name of capital. The well-ordered spaces camp or town reproduced the well-ordered spaces of the factory or the mine and ran explicitly counter to the stereotypical chaos of the working class.

2. Camper Culture. Type 2 and Type 3 work camps move away from the uniformity of Type 1 camps, but nevertheless echo another form of capitalist culture (albeit in a ironic way).  The clusters of camper inhabited by oil patch workers have clear parallels with holiday campers clumped along the shores of various lakes across the northern plains (and the west more generally). The needs and opportunities of the oil patch transformed the campsite from a space of middle-class recreation to a place of working class residence.

3. Agency. On our drives around the Bakken range, Bret Weber and I spent considerable time talking about agency in the settlement patterns exhibited in the oil path. The extreme economy of Type 2 and Type 3 camps and the absence of what many regard as the most basic human comforts hint at the significant poverty and suffering. On the other hand, the temporary and ad hoc nature of the work camps may also reflect a series of economic strategies designed to limit risk and investment in the Bakken oil patch. The nature of booms brought on by natural resource exploitation and global markets makes modest, temporary housing a strategically sound decision for both individuals and communities. Moreover, many of the workers in the oil patch maintain primary residence elsewhere, so economizing at a remote work site is a strategy to maximize profits.  Determining how much agency individual residents of the camps have and what strategies they use to optimize their time in the oil patch will be a key component of interviews as well as efforts to document the material culture.

4. Community. In many of the discussions of the oil patch, we hear how the arrival of significant numbers of workers, heavy equipment, wealth, and all of the attendant chaos has effected local communities. Rarely have we heard much on the nature of communities of workers in the region. While communities may emerge in any number of places, surely the work camps represent a place where some basic community practices come into play. The arrangement of units, dispute resolution practices, discard behavior, and other issues that impact even the most ad hoc communities, certainly manifest themselves on both the social and material levels. The construction of community in the work camps remains a key interest of our project moving forward.

5. Work and Home. One of the more remarkable things at many of the camps was the blurring of the lines between domestic space and space of work. In some cases, Type 1 camps were built on the actual work site. Type 2 and 3 camps were often surrounded with truck tires, industrial equipment, and other indications that the residents used the unit as both a place of work and a place of lodging. Unlike company towns where an effort was made to maintain clear delineations between domestic and industrial space, work camps show a far more fluid and ad hoc relationship between the two spheres. While this is unsurprising perhaps for temporary housing serving an area of rapid industrial expansion, it nevertheless represents another way that life in a North Dakota man camp challenges traditional views of settlement and habitation practice in the U.S.

The temporary nature of camps presents a challenge and opportunity to study settlement strategies in a remarkably dynamic corner of the world. None of the 10 camps that we visited this past weekend, for example, appear on satellite images taken in 2010. Documenting such ephemeral and sudden shifts in human settlement should provide insights into economic and social strategies, changing notions of domesticity, and the requirement of early 21st century industrial capital.

A Typology of North Dakota Work Camps 3

Over the last three days, I have offered a formal typology of work camps associated with the North Dakota oil boom. This is part of a larger project focusing on the archaeology of contemporary work camps.

Type 1 camps are the most elaborate, orderly, and – one would imagine – comfortable. These camps feature prefabricated trailers arranged on a leveled slab, designed for northern winters, and offering most of the comforts of home. Type 2 camps represent more ad hoc arrangements of mobile living units. This type of camp typically involves campers with some amenities including electrical and sewage hook-ups, leveled ground, and some efforts at winterizing.  Type 2 camps show a whole range of different kinds of units and far less rigorous controls of their immediate environments. As a result there is a greater degree of personalization present.

Type 3: These camps are the most informal. They involve mobile trailers like in Type 2 camps, but unlike Type 2 camps, these trailers are not set on formally leveled ground and lack electrical or other hook-ups outside of very informal arrangements. These camps tend to be small and often include only a handful of campers clustered around a farmstead or set in a field. The informal nature of these camps makes it difficult sometimes to identify whether it is a work camp or just a few abandoned older campers parked with discarded farm equipment in a back lot.

The arrangement of units in a Type 3 camp ranges from the chaotic to the well-ordered. The lack of any requirements – such as the location of hook-up – for the arrangement of units means that the positioning of the individual units is at the discretion of the residents or the environment. The freedom to locate each unit in whatever way was suitable allowed residents to pull their vehicles quite close to their homes.  (It is interesting to note that in most cases, the units are arranged in a line or in some sort of orderly fashion even though there is no real reason to arrange the units that way.)

Like Type 2 camps, each unit tends to be different. There is some evidence for winterizing the units against the cold northern plain’s winters. There are also some efforts to personalize the units with chairs, grills, and various other household objects placed outside the camper. Wood pallets served multiple purposes and generally kept objects off the ground. There were also significant amounts of industrial material – like some Type 2 camps – arranged around the units. In some cases, generators or extension cords run to nearby buildings indicate that some ad hoc efforts were made to provide power for each residence.

Type 3 camps are often hybridized with Type 2 camps particularly Type 2 camps attracted more units than utility hook ups. It is also worth noting that some Type 3 camps may not be purely residential. In same cases these camps might serve as office space or break rooms for local workers.

A Typology of North Dakota Work Camps 2

Yesterday, I began to detail (and work out) and document the results of my first formal research trip to the Western part of the state. This is tied into my North Dakota Oil Boom project. My goal is to document the work camps that have grown up in the western part of the state to house the workers arriving to support the oil industry.

We determined that the best approach to document the existing camps in the Bakken counties was to sample the camps according to a formal typology.  Yesterday, I offered a formal typological description of the best-known type of work camps (Type 1). Today, I’ll provide a brief formal description of a Type 2 camp.

Type 2: This camp appears to be every bit as ubiquitous as Type 1 camps. The most significant difference between a Type 1 and Type 2 camp is the type of vehicles present in the camp. Type 1 camps consist of trailers or units that are identical, whereas Type 2 camps contain a wide range of vehicles from small “third wheel” type campers to large motor coaches. Type 2 camps offer hookups for electrical and sewage utilities. The appearance of metered electrical posts at these camps indicates that units are charged individually for electrical consumption.  The sewage and water pipes show significant signs of insulation.

The arrangement of the hooks-ups for electricity and sewage influenced the arrangement of the camp. Typically the units are arranged into some kind of rough grid pattern and often sit on a level gravel surface.  There were few indication of concrete pads or other surfaces around the units.  Informal alleys and roads provided access to the units and in many cases it is possible for the residents to pull their vehicles up to their units.  In the most informal of the Type 2 camps, units are arranged at angles on their lots or even parallel to the main direction of travel to carve out some private space between units.

Most units in the Type 2 camp show some signs of modification to make the units more suitable for the North Dakota winter. They often cover the space between the unit and the ground with either wooden panels of various panels of foam insulation. In some cases, the wheels of the vehicle are removed to allow the resident to seal the wheel wells where cold air apparently could enter the unit. It was common to see efforts to seal the windows with either insulation or metal foil to block both light and the blustery North Dakota winter wind. Some more elaborate units have plywood built mudrooms outside the main doors provided a place for the residents to take their boots and winter gear off before entering the more cramped quarters of the unit.  Some of these units have satellite television receivers attached to the sides of the trailers or on wooden posts set into the ground.

The diversity of units present in the camp provides a backdrop for a wide range of objects distributed around the camps. Unlike Type 1 camps which tend to be almost sterile in their lack of The object range from objects common to any household like coolers, small and large charcoal grills, small propane tanks, children’s bikes, camping and patio chairs, and tables. One of the most elaborate units had a rough fence set up around a small grassy area perhaps for a pet dog. Wooden pallets are ubiquitous at Type 2 sites. They provide raised surfaces for storage, pathways from the unit to parking areas and make shift patios. Some units had generators and larger propane tanks.

Units in Type 2 camps also frequently had discarded or provisional storage of objects associated with industrial work. Large blue barrels, oil cans, tires and wheels from large trucks, and various pieces of equipment.

Finally, we noted that Type 2 camps sometimes had units without proper hooks up arranged around the periphery of the camp. Called “boondocking” by the RV community, long term camps without hooks ups or with particular informal arrangements for electricity or waste disposal (extension cords, port-a-potties, et c.) are described as Type 3 camps. The combination of both types of units in the same camp presents a hybrid type.  At the same time, we did note at least one instance of a Type 2 camp being arranged next to a Type 1 camp that was under construction.

A Typology of North Dakota Work Camps 1

This weekend, I took a trip to western North Dakota to check out “oil patch” were the North Dakota Bakken Oil Boom is consuming several western counties. This trip was part of my newest project focusing on the archaeology of work (aka man) camps and other forms of short-term settlement in the western Bakken counties of North Dakota.

It was remarkable. The area included in the Bakken Oil Fields has become a 70 sq mile industrial part. Huge trucks, small trucks, heavy equipment (including equipment associated with the traditional farm economy), buses for workers, and other vehicles filled the roads even on the holiday weekend. My traveling companion, the indefatigable Bret Weber, assured me that the traffic we witnessed was, in fact, light compared to what he witnessed on an ordinary working day several months before. Prof. Weber is a Ph.D. in history and a licensed social worker with a serious professional interest in housing issues. He and I are going to collaborate on documenting the history and archaeology of these man camps, and he will also bring an eye toward social policy and social justice issues to our work.

The purpose of our trip, of course, was not to document the traffic in the oil patch, but to collect some basic data concerning the man camps in the area (and, yes, the local residents call them man camps) and think about how to approach documenting them in a systematic way with a small team. The first step to doing this was to establish a basis for our sampling strategy. While we considered a regional approach that sampled camps in a number of areas (for example, north of Williston, south of Williston, and in Ft. Berthold), but we soon discovered that the there were not vast difference between the camps in various areas and studying camps in a single county – for example Williams County for which Williston is the seat, could help focus any archival and policy related efforts. We also considered the function of the camps – whether they were in support of a particular mission associated with the oil industry or constructed by a particular company, but soon realized that many of the camps housed a range of different types of workers – often from different companies.  Finally, we concluded that the best approach to our study of man camps would be a sampling based on a rough typology of camps. We felt like there were clear differences between at least 3 types of camps and I’ll attempt to unpack this typology over the next few days.

Type 1: This most prominent and best known type of camp. It features prefabricated trailers brought in from outside the area on an industrial scale. The trailers rest on a bed of leveled gravel or pea-rock in neat rows. In some cases there are well-made, poured concrete footings or “rails” on which the trailers rest. Each of the trailers has power, water, and appears to be hooked into a sanitation system. The pipes and cables are typically routed beneath the trailers.  In general, the appearance of the units in the Type 1 camp is uniform.

Each trailer has two to four windows on the outside and most often a single door.  The walls are either wood paneled, aluminum, or fiberglass. The windows appeared either covered with blinds or fabric draperies. Some windows had non-functioning shutters. All of these trailers had a single doors on the long side of the structure. The door was the size and design of standard steel-type domestic doors and were typically reached by a small set of wood stair or metal stairs with wood treads.  The roofs were either pitched or vaulted with a few examples of flat roofs.  In one case, the trailers were designed to be stacked atop one another. Some trailers had satellite television receivers attached to exterior walls. Some had air-conditioning units on their flanks or roof.

In the several Type 1 camps that we visited, the trailers had lot numbers neatly painted on the sides or had parking spaces that allowed the residents to pull their vehicles up immediately outside the trailer. Other than this, however, we found few objects outside of the trailers to distinguish one from the next. Very rarely there was a small grill or a set of camping chairs. The areas around the units were clean with little signs of trash or discard. No weeds grew amidst the gravel and the entire camp appeared neat and orderly. Some of the larger Type 1 camps provided secure access.

For some of the largest camps, there was common space set aside for the residents and exterior the individual housing units.

In most cases, the Type 1 camps were established by either major companies invested in resource extraction in the Bakken oil patch or by companies who specialize in the support of the oil industry.  Some of these camps housed workers who came to the area for a single project; for example, a work camp supported the construction of a rail depot near Tioga. In other cases, camps houses individuals working across the patch for different companies with different jobs.

Planning my First Trip Out West

This weekend I’m going to make my first foray into the wilds of western North Dakota. Regular readers of my blog know that this trip is tied to my newest small research project which looks at documenting artifact scatters associated with the contemporary work camps that have grown up in support of the Bakken oil fields. For this trip, my primary goals are:

1. To document the range of temporary settlements present in the area. It is clear that work camps involve everything from formally constructed camps provided by companies like Target Logistics to campers set up in the Walmart parking lot, squatting on public land, and hot-cotting. My hope is that a few days around Williston will help me develop an informal typology of camps.

2. To identify camps or sites for study. If I can create an informal typology, I should be able to  identify several potential study sites for a longer and more formal visit to region this summer. My hope is to attempt to organize my future fieldwork to sample in an efficient way the material signature of different kinds of camps.

3. To begin to develop a method for documenting the camps and their material signatures. This will be the most difficult aspect of the weekend. As I become more familiar with the kinds and distribution of materials associated with a living work camp, I will need to develop an efficient method for documenting the objects present. Ideally, we can create a method that would allow the comparison between camp sites while at the same time preserving the unique character of the artifactual assemblages.

4. Background Information. The greatest challenge for me will be to determine a way to collect contextual information on the various camps. For the larger, more formally organized camps, this should not be a particular challenge as they will have zoning records as well as regular paperwork on number of residents, capacity, et c. For the less formal camps, I anticipate the potential issues for documenting site history, the number of residents, and the stability of settlement. The archaeological data will provide a snap shot of a moment in time. Contextual information in the form of interviews, texts, and satellite images will provide information concerning the processes that produced the archaeological assemblage.

To collect data this weekend, I will rely on a motley assortment of technologies:

1. Garmin Gecko 201. This little, green, GPS unit has been my field companion for close to 10 years.  Compared to newer Garmin products, it is pretty lame, but for collecting GPS points for large sites like work camps, it will do just fine.

2. Evernote. I plan to collect preliminary notes using the audio note function on Evernote on my iPhone 4S. This feature has two benefits. First, it lets me collect audio notes and save them directly to the cloud (no need for a separate backup process). And, it assigns the notes GPS coordinates. So I have spatial control. This is a cheap version of what Richard Rothaus has been doing with his field workflow (and I’d link this to his blog description of it, but I can’t find it any more).

3. A Corinth Notebook. At some point I acquired a small number of “Corinth style” notebooks. I have one left. My plan is to designate this notebook my “North Dakota Work Camp Project Notebook”. These notebooks are rugged, clothbound graph paper and designed for archaeological field notes.

4. Nikon Coolpix P6000 Camera. These little-ish cameras seem to be indestructible (unless dropped from a blimp), allow for geocoding photographs, and reliable.

Wish me luck this weekend and check back early next week for a full report!

Archaeology of Consumer Culture and North Dakota Work Camps

I finished reading Paul R. Mullins’ newish book, The Archaeology of Consumer Culture, in the excellent University Press of Florida’s The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective Series. The book provides a concise and readable overview of archaeology’s engagement with the consumption of mass produced goods. Rich in case studies and examples, Mullins’ reflects on the intersection of consumer culture and the archaeological indications of wealth and poverty, the mechanisms of demand, the impact of moralizing attitudes toward consumption, as well as issues of identity, gender, and ethnicity. The bibliography alone is worth the very reasonable price of the book.

I read this book as I continued to think about my short field season in the western part of North Dakota this summer where I hope to document the material signature of active work camps in the landscape. As readers of this blog know, the Western North Dakota is experiencing an oil boom right now that is bringing unprecedented prosperity, demographic growth, and problems to the communities associated with the Bakken Oil Fields. Among the numerous tropes of circulating about the oil boom, the change in consumption patterns among both local (pre-boom) residents of the affected counties and brought into the region by the newcomers who have arrived to work in the oil fields. Most of our information on these shifting patterns remains at the level of literary trope or fictional constructs. There might be a kernel of truth to the various mythic tales coming from the west, but the stories remain instructive in understanding how the various communities imagine changes in their collective material culture.

For example, in a now infamous and largely fictional memo circulated to various media outlets in January, it was reported that the local Walmart no longer restocked shelves, but just moved pallets of goods into the aisles for the newcomers to devour. According to the same memo, some local fast-food restaurants are only operating drive-ins because staff are too difficult to find and retain and those that are open have waits of up to an hour for tables. Finally, the Williston GM dealership is the top seller of Corvettes in the Northern Plains. Investigations of the many of these claims have proven them to be untrue, but the sentiments remain the same: booming economies should strain and change local patterns of consumption.

Mullins’ book does not look specifically at consumption in boom time economies, but he does look at the way in which patterns of consumption can serve to create or obscure markers of socio-economic differences, produce various local, national, and international identities, and locate core and periphery within the topography of consumption and production.

1. Poverty and Wealth. One of the most interesting aspects of the Western North Dakota Oil Boom is that it has pushed tremendous amounts of new money into the local economies. Both the new workers and local residents have access to more disposable income. Local traditions of modesty – so typical in agricultural communities where prosperity tends to be cyclical and dictated by chance – will shape how residents express newly found wealth. Among newer groups to the community, patterns of consumption will perhaps mark out boundaries between differing reasons for coming to the area and different access to wealth depending on the jobs they performed in the boom economy. Documenting differences in consumption and attempting to correlate variation across the work camps will play a key role in my research this summer.

2. Identity. The outsiders in the Bakken fields bring to the community distinct material and consumption practices. Some of these differences emerge from the relationship between newcomers and their companies (uniforms that feature the name Halliburton, for example).  Other patterns in consumption mark out ethnic or regional difference (e.g. brand preferences, styles, et c.). It will be particularly useful to attempt to see how different communities of workers mark themselves out as distinct.

3. Cores and Peripheries. It is easy to see the oil boom in Western North Dakota as fitting into a pattern where the core – vested transnational companies and the demands for natural resources away from the region where they are being produced – exploits the periphery. Local residents are then displaced – economically, socially, and culturally – for the needs of the core.

On the other hand, the expansion of consumer culture and national chains has blurred the difference between consumption patterns at the core and those at the periphery. This has the potential to obscure the distinction between the newcomers and the long time residents and mitigate the impact of long term community integration. While the difference between local residents and newcomers extend beyond consumption patterns to be sure, the growing integration between core and periphery makes it difficult for outside interest to control variables (i.e. the company town) as well as to distinguish between locals and newcomers based on tastes and practices.

A Rough Sketch of Work in the North Dakota Work Camps

As readers of this blog know, I’m slowing articulating a small archaeological fieldwork project that will focus on the material culture, architecture, and landscape associated with work camps in western North Dakota.

This project is part of a larger collaborative initiative recently funded by our Vice President of Research that has brought together scholars from Social Work, Indian Studies, and Anthropology to investigate social change in the oil producing Bakken Counties of North Dakota. As part of coordinating our disparate efforts, we all decided to write up a proposal, in informal language, that would describe our goals.

We have also begun to collect bibliography using Zotero. We have a growing bibliography on the social impact of oil booms and the archaeology of work camps and other sites of natural resource extraction. We are also collecting media reports, newspaper article, blog posts and the like that refer to boomtowns particularly in the western part of North Dakota. Follow the links above to check them out. If you’ve been putting off using Zotero to collect citation, now is the time to start! They have just released Zotero 3.0 which is a lovely and powerful stand alone piece of citation management software which integrates seamlessly with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It’s a pleasure to use and free and open source!

Here’s my informal proposal:

A Proposal for The Archaeology of Work Camps in Western North Dakota

Introduction

The last 40 years has seen a “boom” in the study of industrial archaeology. Work camps and community have formed central features in the conversation among archaeologist of both the recent and distant past.  Work camps and the communities that they housed played a key role in the extraction of natural resources on a global scale and, locally, in the settlement of the American west. Archaeological study of these communities has demonstrated how they both reinforced social divisions based on race, wealth, education, and job, but also allowed for remarkable opportunities for social and economic mobility and transgressive behavior. Most archaeologists have recognized in the material left behind from these camps evidence for resistance to existing social norms at the economic and, indeed, geographic margins of American society.  As messy, gritty, discordant Foucualdian heterotopias, work camps – like the frontier itself in Turner’s naive imagination – provided a model for an American future.

Architectural historians, likewise, have begun to develop a sustained interest in short-term housing and settlement prompted in large part by the use of temporary housing in the aftermath of Katrina and the well-publicized use of camps during the global refugee crises that have dominated the last 60s years. Coincidentally, the recent interest in temporary housing and the structure of highly contingent communities has returned to the American west in the study of dynamic communities in places like Slab City, California and Quartzite, Arizona where two very different groups have availed themselves to the margins of settlement to create dynamic, contingent communities. As some pundits and scholars have noted, the dynamic nature of the communities among refugees, at Slab City and in the Bakken counties find parallels with the flexibility preached in the post-industrial economy, in cutting edge models of American higher education, and in the playful workspaces of high-tech start ups. If the 19th century mining camp represented one possible future for American society, then perhaps the post-Katrina refugee camp, the Bakken Man Camp, and the conventicle of RVers gathering in Quartzite suggest another potential future.

In the humanities more generally, this interest in short-term or temporary habitation strategies and community echoes the so-called “spatial turn” or “material turn” in the humanities which recognizes the fundamentally spatial and material character of human relations. By documenting the material signature, physical organization, and the complex places that work camps occupy in the landscape of western North Dakota, this project seeks to represent these contingent communities in a spatial way.

Methods and Questions

From the perspective of methodology, the study of existing work camps has the potential to shed light on the complexities of the formation processes that produce archaeological sites. While contemporary practices and material present significantly different challenges for archaeologists, documenting basic discard patterns associated with short term settlement practices could provide useful archaeological analogues for understanding past site formation. Moreover, it serves as important documentation for future archaeological work in the region which will inevitably have to deal with the remains of temporary and short-term settlement associated with the oils boom.

By documenting discard practices, site organization, and settlement patterns, an archaeologist can record the material environment that both shapes and is shaped by social interactions. Archaeologists have long harbored the conceit that objects can tell us things that oral and textual sources cannot. Careful and systematic documentation of work camps provides a way to produce the material signature of social, economic, and political relationships. Ideally this work will include both the sanctioned work camps as well as the myriad alternative settlement practices ranging from “hotcotting”  to unsanctioned camps that have appeared in private and public space and various forms of quasi-legal and illegal squatting among individuals and communities working in the Bakken oil fields.

Finally, while archaeological documentation has typically focused at the scale of the trench or the site, recent work in the field has sought to step back from the individual site to consider the landscape as a scale of human society.  The landscape of western North Dakota has entered a period of particularly dynamic change. These changes are set against a landscape that already wears the marks of human exploitation. Photography of the western landscape – in both its “pristine glory” and as the tamed mistress of American economic exceptionalism – has played a key roll in how we imagine the normative landscapes. By placing man-camps and other installations in their relationship to older images of rural space, we not only problematize the aesthetics of exploitation, but also document the character of rapid change.

Any study of the impact and form of economic phenomenon risks being interpreted as subversive or manipulated in such a way as to discredit the authenticity and honesty of the findings. Recognizing that this risk is particular acute in environments where economically powerful interest already feel embattled. To attempt to guard against these pressures, the project will include aspects of “guerrilla archaeology” where low-impact fieldwork that attempts to document a range of different habitation sites with a minimum of collaboration or collusion with sources of local authority.

Procedures

My research plan calls for 2 short trips to the Bakken Counties. The first trip will focus on issues of identification and access to proposed study sites.  This trip will be guided both by data collected from western sources and through the careful study of recent satellite photographs of the areas around New Town and Williston.  Reasonable estimates of distances and some basic procedures for documenting visible material culture will help to determine the equipment and number of people required to document the work camps successfully.

A second trip will occur in the summer months (July or August) and be a maximum of 7 days. This trip will involve primary data collection from a specific group of sites using GPS, photography, forms, and notebooks.  I hope to document I would also like to collaborate, if possible, with a photographer and, if possible, with some local archaeologists familiar with the challenges and opportunities of working in the Bakken counties.

Mining in Cyprus and Work Camps in North Dakota

The coincidence between the archaeology of mining in Cyprus and my new (albeit small) research interest in the archaeology of work camps in western North Dakota is exciting. I spent the weekend reading some relatively recent publications from Bernard Knapp and his team who excavated the site of Politiko-Phorades in the eastern Troodos mountains of Cyprus (see here and here).

The site itself was a Late Bronze Age copper smelting site in impressive state of preservation. Discovered in the course of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and that team has worked to associated the site with larger systems established to support the extraction of copper from the Troodos mountains. Knapp argued that the site probably only functioned seasonally and was worked by individuals who also contributed to the local agricultural economy. A nearby settlement with access to arable land, then, provided agricultural support for the resource extraction. The system described by Knapp understands mining as a practice that functions at the physical margins of economic systems and remained dependent on longstanding subsistence practices. The emergence of large Late Bronze Age centers like Kition and Enkomi, however, almost certainly influenced the settlement patters that supported the extraction of mineral resources.

In a 2003 article in the American Journal of Archaeology, Knapp seeks to take this analysis a step further by exploring how these patterns of production have shaped communities. Drawing on evidence and models from world archaeology, Knapp reflected on the impermanence and marginal status of the Politiko-Phorades production site and its productive and ideational relationship to the surrounding landscape. The marginal position of mining communities forged a tension between social and economic isolation and profound dependence on “other places”. No one is from a mining community, but, at the same time, these places must have both generated and depended upon social understandings. Knapp regards the forms of habitus that emerge in these contexts as central to the formation of “imagined communities” necessary to ensure both social cohesion and economic productivity at industrial sites.

The archaeology of mining communities poses another unique set of problems. The disjunction between the social life of a community and the material reality of these sites is particular profound in that the sites are typically occupied for short periods of time and received minimal investments in features that would enable archaeologists to analyze social organization of the community. In fact, the handful of pottery recovered from the site of Politiko-Phorades that could have been associated with domestic activities does not seem to have received anything more than cursory analysis in Knapp’s preliminary publications of the site. In other words, the small amount of fine wares that probably derived from basic domestic activities at the site, primarily speak to “the specialized nature of the site” rather than providing the basis for understanding the efforts of Bronze Age metal workers to preserve ties to “the outside world” of socially constructed relationships.  In the preliminary analysis and in the preserved evidence, then, the economic world of the mining community seems to overwrite the scant evidence for a social life.

Knapp concludes his 2003 article with a series of recommendations for the archaeology of community in an industrial context and suggests that three steps remain necessary:

At least three steps are needed to develop further an archaeology of communities:

1. to engage studies of place in examining the relationship between locality and community.
2. to refine and elaborate the concerted of the “imagined community”
3. to examine more closely and understand more fully the association among people, locality, community, and material culture as the outcome of specific social and historical processes.

In western North Dakota, the massive influx of workers in support of the oil industry has energized new discussions on the nature of communities in these otherwise sleepy (and we can say marginal) regions. The attitudes of longtime residents in these areas have centered on the disruptive effects of these new arrivals and this new industry on their communities. There has been less attention, however, on the communities that have formed among the new arrival to western North Dakota.

We know, however, that workers in western North Dakota follow longstanding practices common to mining and industrial communities. The investment in habitation is minimal and reflects an interest in maximizing the economic return on their efforts and the limited expectations for the long term sustainability of their activities. The boom in both sanctioned and unsanctioned work camps and the appearance of well-defined work sites provide a material locus for at least some activities central to social organization. There are complemented by less clearly defined areas such ranging from the bars, strip clubs, and restaurants that have grown up to serve the influx of works to jails, schools, churches, and town centers which have become places for the interaction between pre-existing communities and new arrivals.

The changes in western North Dakota have led both longtime residents and new comers to re-imagine their communities and establish new ways of viewing the local landscape and their own sense of place. While both groups recognized the local landscape as fundamentally productive (whether in terms of its mineral wealth or in terms of its agricultural potential), they nevertheless recognized fundamentally different relationships between lands, economy, and community. The ties between community and productive space which Knapp underscored in his articles have become contested as both sides read the landscape in an effort to legitimize their own practices and policies.

An archaeology of community in the context of western North Dakota will invariably consider the relationship between material objects, settlement, and social organization as set against changing notions of community and the physical and productive landscape.

Collaboration and Work Camps out West

Earlier this month, we found out that our Vice President for Research funded a collaborative seed grant for a preliminary, transdisciplinary study of work camps and social change in the oil producing counties in western North Dakota. This relatively modest grant will fund a range of initiatives for a range of scholars from Social Work, Indian Studies, Anthropology, and History. (See below for a copy of our research proposal.)  As readers of this blog know, my contribution to this interdisciplinary party, is an archaeology of work camps. Last week, we had our first meeting as a team and it was exciting to see what the various collaborators could bring to the table and the challenges that working on this environment would entail:

1. Common vocabulary. One of the most interesting things about our team is that we appear to have some basic shared theoretical assumptions ranging from an understanding of a core-periphery model for the study of resource extraction in boom/bust environments, to an appreciation of the value of participant action research (PAR) and a commitment to the integration of both “indigenous” (broadly defined) and “etic” perspectives.  Despite these common intellectual spaces, we do not share a common vocabulary for discussing how we will approach gathering and organizing data from the western part of the state. It is probably not necessary to standardize our theoretical and methodological vocabulary across the entire team, but some kind of concordance would facilitate communication.

2. Perspectives on the Oil Boom. One of the most interesting conversations we had at our first meeting was how to characterize the experiences the oil boom. On the one hand, the challenges facing these western communities are pretty well known (in fact, this list has gone viral over the past five days; but note well: its authenticity is under review.). But, as one archaeologist who has worked out west a good bit over the past few years remarked: it’s nice to work out there because ‘everyone’ is making money, so ‘everyone’ is happy. It is clear that ironic edge to most media reporting has emphasized the negative impact of the sudden prosperity experienced by these counties (with echoes of such great documentary studies as The Beverly Hillbillies). On the other hand, some people have benefited from the oil boom and emphasizing the challenges of the boom as more significant than its benefits will not necessarily be consistent with the experience of participants.

3. Longitudinal Perspectives. Research into the social impact of the North Dakota oil boom has just started in earnest, but the boom itself is at least three years old. As researchers, we are going to insert ourselves into an event that is already underway. While certain kinds of “base line data” are available from state and local agencies, the so-called Bakken counties attracted very little sustained humanistic research interest prior to the oil boom. As a result, it will be challenging to document in a longitudinal way the experiences of individuals in this region. The nostalgia tinged media reports from the counties are already showing signs that local residents are harkening back to a romantic view of the past. While it is vital to give voice to these perspective on the boom, we should keep them in the context of the recent, dramatic changes to the area.

4. Logistics. When telling people of our project one of the first things they tell us is that it is impossible to work in the western counties. The litany of reasons begins slow – there are no hotel rooms or they are only available at exorbitant prices ($600 for a room at a Hotel 6!!) – and get more dire – 2, 3, and 4 hour traffic jams, empty Wallmart shelves, no toilet paper for 300 miles, and drunken mobs roaming the countryside. These admonitions finally culminate with a series of insane statements like entire counties are closed to traffic (echoes of the candid camera “Delaware is Closed Today” episode), food shortages, and flesh-eating, undead zombies released by fracking.  When sanity returns, we have to accept that doing work out west will be challenging. Basic services are pushed to the limits, many local officials are already experiencing “interview fatigue”, and we want to avoid being seen as part of the problem. On the other hand, it is interesting to realize that our own experiences in these areas as researchers will not differ radically from the experiences of individuals who have come from other places to work in this area and live in these communities.

More on my contributions to our research goals later in the week.

Here’s our grant proposal:

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