A few months ago, an old friend Ömür Harmanşah nudged me to submit an abstract to a workshop panel he was organizing at next year’s annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research titled “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East”. I wrote up a little speculative blog post on it a few weeks ago.
Now, after some conversations with my colleague Bret Weber and a draft abstract, I concocted something. The title is not very good, but I have until the end of the week to get that straight. More than that, this is for a workshop session so the paper will be very brief and mostly serve as a an initial point of departure for a larger conversation.
The Bakken, the Contemporary, and the Global.
Many scholars have argued that the “oil crises” of the 1970s initiated a new period in global capitalism. Deregulation, privatization, and a deepening faith in the market as the arbiter of meaningful policy produced an environment in which goods, people, and capital flowed and pooled at a global scale. While today it remains possible to talk about nation states, the “Global” North and South, the Middle East and the “West,” and various other regional, ideological, political, and economic identifiers, these often terms reveal as much about global systems as they do local situations. Indeed, the interplay between the local and global anticipates an archaeology of the anthropocene, climate change, and the 21st century.
From 2013-2018, the North Dakota Man Camp project has studied temporary workforce housing and the industrial landscape of the Bakken Oil Patch in Western North Dakota. Our research in the Bakken traced the flow of capital, technology, oil, and most importantly people through the landscape of Western North Dakota. This paper makes a speculative comparison between the Bakken and the archaeology of the contemporary Middle East as a way to reconsider the spatial and temporal scales necessary to understand global capitalism, an archaeology of the contemporary, and the anthropocene.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 