The Bakken Hundreds (Almost Final)

Over the last few weeks, Bret Weber and I have been working to refine our “Bakken Hundreds” piece for a volume called Archaeology Out-of-the-Box. 

Since our invitation to be part of the volume was pretty vague, we took advantage of the freedom to do something a bit different. We previewed an earlier draft here a couple of weeks ago, here’s the final draft.

This introduction is below followed by a link to download the entire paper.  

The Bakken Hundreds

The Bakken Hundreds describe seven seasons of archaeological fieldwork in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch (2012-2018). The North Dakota Man Camp Project focused on workforce housing through archaeological documentation and authorized interviews. Here, the co-authors alternate 100-word statements from project notebooks, interviews, and publications loosely following Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s composition style in, The Hundreds (2019). Our assemblage reveals the material and social conditions of the Bakken by emphasizing the frenetic, dreamlike, precarity of boom times. For entries with specific dates, we also include the West Texas Intermediate Crude oil price per barrel as a rough indicator of Bakken prosperity.

Here’s a link to the entire paper.