Three Article Thursday: Climate, Housing, and History

There’s an old saying: every story is about climate change, especially stories about climate change. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but some days it feels pretty plausible. 

Over the last week, I’ve been slowly trying to get back into a more healthy habit of reading. I have a stack of stuff to read this spring for my classes and a stack of stuff to read for NDQ and The Digital Press, and this leaves me less time than I would like to try to read around in my fields. As a result, I’m going to try to focus some attention on article length works this winter and spring. I started this new strategy with three articles on top of my “to read” pile. They all happened to have some oblique relevance to the climate change narratives that are structuring so much reporting on our current cold snap.

Article the First

As soon as I saw the title “Fieldwork in an Increasingly Variable Climate: The Kites in Context Project 2023 Field Season” from the Journal of Field Archaeology, I knew that I wanted to read this article. The team of authors, Austin Chad Hill, Yorke M. Rowan, Ali Atallah Al-Hajj, Jennifer Feng, Joseph Harris, Blair Heidkamp, Morag M. Kersel, Megan Nishida and Amelie Schmücker, combine narrative with a photo essay to describe their experiences working in Jordan’s Black Desert during an exceptional rain event in the summer of 2023. They describe how two days of rain during the ordinarily dry summer months flooded their camp, disrupted their field work, and offered hints to how Neolithic groups managed to survive in now sparely inhabited Black Desert. 

The archaeology of archaeology has fascinated me and I’m particularly interested in understanding how climate conditions will shape field work practices in the Mediterranean. As temperatures and climate variability increase in the Mediterranean summer months, the key time for foreign research projects to work in the region, one wonders whether climate change might work to decolonize archaeological field projects by disrupting the season colonialism of foreign projects.   

Just to be clear, I’m not implying that the Kites in Context project is particularly colonial, but the dramatic story and photographs of their summer field work in 2023 makes it clear that climate change is already shaping their work.

Article the Second

Yesterday, I had a chance to chat with a reporter about the tensions between the need for workforce housing in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch and the surge in evictions that occurred during the boom decade of the early 21st century. The impetus for this discussion was a recent article by Carl Gershenson, Olivia Jin, Jacob Haas and Matthew Desmond in the journal Society & Natural Resources titled “Fracking Evictions: Housing Instability in a Fossil Fuel Boomtown.” 

The article applies the concept of “resource curse” to domestic resource booms rather than formally colonized areas (typically in the global south). The notion of the resource curse posits that the presence of natural resources in a region actually slows economic growth in the longer term. Whether this is tied to deliberate strategies associated with the “development of under development” or the social byproduct of the “slow violence” associated with extractive industries more broadly is almost irrelevant. Gershenson not only argue evictions represent one way in which resource booms produce longer term social instability as evicted individuals often struggle to benefit from educational, employment, and health care opportunities even when the extraction of natural resources allows for greater investments in these areas. This largely follows Matthew Desmond’s work on evictions elsewhere.  

Carl Gershenson and company demonstrate that evictions went from being an exceedingly rare phenomena in Williston in North Dakota prior to the oil boom to a regular occurrence. Moreover, they were able to suggest that long-time residents of North Dakota experience more evictions than new residents. This plausibly suggests that we should associate evictions with the rise in rents which impacted local residents — presumably on lower or fixed incomes — more than new comers to the region whose salaries were more commensurate with the increasing housing costs.

The most fascinating thing about this article was the graph that showed how evictions increased in lockstep with the rate of oil production. How cool is that?

Article the Third

Finally, I have really enjoyed dipping into Nikolas Bakirtzis and Luca Zavagno, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Byzantine City: From Justinian to Mehmet II (ca. 500 – ca.1500). Zavagno’s historiographic survey of work on the Byzantine City from Late Antiquity to the Late Byzantine period is a must read for anyone trying to navigate the tension between the city as a type of settlement with certain characteristics recognizable across time and culture and the city as a historical phenomenon. In some ways, this tension mimics the tension between continuity and change so familiar to scholars of the Late Roman, Early Medieval, and Early Byzantine periods. In other ways, it’s much more challenging because drifting toward “the only constant is change” renders opaque how changes reflected new social, political, and religious realities; on the other hand, an essentialized view of the city pulls us toward ahistorical readings of past which are equally unsatisfying.

Zavagno shows how historians and archaeologists have threaded this needle over the last 30 years. Significant for the theme of this post is that growing interest in the relationship between the environment and the city with particular attention being given to water management. If we think about cities as a particular manifestation of the Holocene climatic optimum, then climate and the distinctive environment conditions it fostered and urbanism are inseparable. Zavagno’s survey doesn’t necessarily point to this issue specifically, but rather is suggestive that future work on the Byzantine city will not only have to take into account the long history of the Holocene while also pointing in new directions which shows how the Byzantine city can contribute to conversations about urbanism and climate change in the contemporary world. 

Arid Empires in a Liquid World

Last weekend, I enjoyed reading Natalie Koch’s Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso 2023). This was a spontaneous read, but I was drawn to it because it offered another perspective on the relationship between the American west and the Middle East. Last year, I played around with these ideas in a paper that that still sits on my hard drive not doing much of anything called: “Bakken Babylon”.

I probably wrote the paper without fully understanding what I was trying to say. Koch’s book offers an intriguing and well-researched take on the connection between American attitudes toward the arid West and our attitudes and involvement in the Middle East. Her book starts with the American effort to use imported camels in the newly acquired western territories in the 1850s. While this experiment was not particularly successful, it did offer a vivid example of the connections between American imperialism in the West and their literal and imaginary involvement in the Middle East. 

Koch isn’t the first to observe this, of course. Any number of scholars have noted and explored how Biblical imagery and narratives informed American views of the West (and how views of the American West informed ideas about the Near East in the past and the present). Koch’s example, however, takes the symbolism this symbolism and makes it literal by tracing not only the strange story of how camels played a small role in American efforts to “conquer” the southwest, but also through the tangled relationship between the University of Arizona and various agricultural experiments in Oman, in Saudi Arabia, and in the United Arab Emirates. Researchers from the University of Arizona sought to share expertise acquired through farming in the arid southwest with the modernizing states of the Middle East. Ironically, some of the American expertise, such as varieties of dates grown in Arizona, originated in the Middle East. The process of sharing (or returning, in some cases) agricultural practices and technologies with the Middle East over the course of the 20th century followed the contours of growing American interest in the region. In other words, there is a relationship between American experiences as a colonial power in the arid West and American experiences abroad. The relationship isn’t tidy or linear and as entangled in various religious, literary, and even artistic imagery as immediate political or economic realities.

There are obvious parallels between Koch’s work and the work of Donald Worster. In Rivers of Empire, Worster shows how American attitudes toward water and rivers in the American West not only had roots in the Biblical imagination, but also the real experiences of British imperialism in India where massive efforts to control the flow of rivers were part of larger (and largely misguided) colonial schemes “to modernize” Indian agriculture. Like Koch’s camels, imperialism and the imaginary Middle East go hand-in-hand not only in the production of the contemporary American West, but also, reciprocally, in our attitudes toward “the Orient” (variously defined) more broadly.     

This brings me back to my little experiment with the Bakken and Babylon. While the connections between the Bakken and a real or imaginary Babylon are far less concrete than those explored by Koch, I do think that exploring the geographic fluidity of the American West does open the door to both new readings of American imperialism (as Koch has demonstrated), but also how the flow of water, oil, and capital create our modern world. Maybe this offers a literal reading of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity by crossing it with Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. The result of this would be far less concrete, but perhaps also far more reflective of the entanglement of empire, resources, and capital in a 21st century world.

Pennsylvania Coal and North Dakota Oil

I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading Michael Roller’s and Paul Shackel’s work on northeast Pennsylvania coal industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their ability to locate the activities around Hazleton, Pennsylvania (particularly Lattimer and Pardeesville) in the history of American labor, immigration, capitalism, and in Paul Shackel’s most recent book, global capitalism: An Archaeology of Unchecked Capitalism: From the American Rust Belt to the Developing World (2020).

(As an aside, the title is a bit misleading in that the book is filled with examples where workers, communities, and even the state checked and shaped the growth of global capitalism.)

Shackel’s 2020 book did a nice job connecting global trends to the situation in Northeastern Pennsylvania both literally and conceptually. Shackel literally connects the sweat shops in Bangladesh to Northeastern Pennsylvania by tracking the garment industry from Hasleton’s silk mills to contemporary sweatshops in Southeast Asia and Oceana. A case study from the North Mariana Islands which were once a key location for garment manufacturing, demonstrated how the territory’s exemption from US immigration policies allowed for the flourishing of low-cost manufacturing. This effective reprises the history of coal extraction in Northeastern Pennsylvania where immigrants provided easily exploited, low-cost, labor in the mines.

The book isn’t long and when read alongside Michael Roller’s work and Shackel’s 2018 book, Remembering Lattimer it provides a vivid window into the construction of contemporary capitalism and its relationship to state policy, race, immigration, and the labor movement.

This got me wondering whether our work in the Bakken oil patch might contribute to how we imagine an archaeology of future capitalism. The ephemeral character of settlement, the temporary character of the work, and it’s hyper-sensitivity to the ebbs and flows of global capital make Bakken oil and labor in the patch a microcosm for the volatile and inhumane nature of the contemporary economy. This isn’t to suggest that Shackel and Roller are wrong in their reading of Northeastern Pennsylvania coal country as representing and anticipating the 20th century economy, but instead to wonder whether the Bakken might represent a depressing modern equivalent for the 21st century economy. 

Unfortunately, I’m struggling to find time to read (much less write) lately. Mostly this is good: I’m working on projects with the press and recharging my batteries before the start of the semester. But to some extent this is bad: I’m getting restless and my ideas need to discipline of thoughtful (or at least interested) reading and writing. 

Settling the Bakken

Over the weekend I had the chance to read  Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun’s edited volume Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil. (Minneapolis 2022). It was perhaps the most mature and thoughtful collection of articles on the Bakken that I’ve had the chance to read. Not only to the authors show a deft grasp of contemporary theory on time, settler colonialism, and petromasculinity (among other perspectives), but also a distinctive view of the Bakken which stands neatly between local familiarity and the Bakken as an icon of extractive practices on a global scale. In fact, when I first was thinking about this book, I found myself bothered by the seeming lack of deep familiarity with the Bakken situation. This feeling only dissipated when I was able to take a deep breath and realize that whatever the contributors knew about the Bakken, the goal of this book was not to capture the Bakken as a place, but as a supermodern phenomenon with a global (or at very least national) context.

As per my typical practice, I offer here less of a review and more of a reaction to the book which I expect I’ll continue to think about and unpack over the next few months.  

Settler Colonialism and Petromasculinity. I particularly appreciated the thoughtful analysis of the interplay between historical depictions of the frontier and contemporary depictions of the rugged white male carving a precarious livelihood out of a reluctant territory. This echoes the recent dissertation by Nestor Silva (which I blogged about here). The contributors to Settling the Boom show how the narrative of settler colonial masculinity culminates in the modern era in which settlers tame “unruly landscapes” through private property. Private property becomes the basis for idealized forms of family life and ultimately suburbanization where a tamed version of “nature” is allowed to reemerge under the watchful eye of heteronormative male with his prophylactic lawnmower. My only critique of this is that the contributors missed an opportunity to recognize how settler colonial attitudes manifest themselves in the subtle efforts to evoke suburban life even in the temporary accommodations offered by work force housing. 

Settler and Boom Time. I also found particularly compelling the various arguments — often visual — for how residents of the Bakken constructed historical continuity between settler times and the modern boom. This served to reinforce a sense of inevitability in the history of the region (culminating we’re led to believe in single-family suburban homes) and to marginalize temporal regimes that challenge this narrative (whether by non-conforming settler individuals or Indigenous individuals and communities). The most compelling consequence of these arguments is that they establish the inescapability of a future dependent on oil, capitalism, and colonialism. I do with that the authors explored a bit more intensively the “cracks in capitalism,” however, which sometimes manifest themselves in narrative of oil field workers themselves and challenge the slick and more managed depictions of settler and boom futures promoted by oil companies, the state, and communities throughout the region.  

Cruel Optimism and Fast Oil. This is not to suggest that the contributors to this volume didn’t dig more deeply into the local situation. On a micro-scale, settler colonial narratives support an extractive industry that relies on the continuous, rapid drilling of wells in the Bakken. Fracked wells in the region decline quickly in productivity once fracked. This aspect of Bakken production demonstrates the kind of “geosocial” assemblages that several commentators have noted as characterizing life in the Anthropocene. The geology of the region combines with the prevalence of small time operators in the region who relied on loans to secure capital necessary to drill and who had to drill to pay off debts acquired while drilling earlier wells. As a result, the pace of drilling the Bakken was faster than elsewhere (and sometimes referred to as the “drilling treadmill”). This combination embodies a kind of cruel optimism (sensu Berlant) that informs extractive work in the Bakken and authorizes companies (and workers) to take greater risks. The only way to make work in the Bakken possible is to believe that at some point in the future the treadmill will stop. 

Vulnerability and Security. A number of contributors highlight the tension between vulnerability and security in the Bakken. Kai Bosworth’s brilliant analysis of the DAPL protests is compelling case study for how the oil industry supported by massive quantities of private capital and the state (including the massive capacity of the state for focused violence). Despite these advantages, the oil industry nevertheless depicts itself as vulnerable to attack by everything from protestors to regulations, climate, and even non-state terrorists. This vulnerability allows even the most colonialist project to take on the mantle of victimhood and for the state to intervene in the name of preserving our “way of life.” Alternate perspectives on the place of oil (as well as capitalism and democracy) represents threats that seek to punch down on the fragile underpinnings of our every day life. This justifies the brutal economic, individual and collective violence necessary to protect its viability. 

Infrastructure. In the end, the book highlights the intellectual, political, economic, and physical infrastructure necessary to make a boom function in contemporary society. From the narratives that various agents construct to support places within the global economy to the financial and political tools used to naturalize these narratives as inevitable, the manifestations of these narratives “on the ground,” and the technology adopted to allow for the continued functioning of these systems, the authors recognize that the infrastructure of settler colonialism is robust, persistent, and most of all complex.

That alone makes the sometimes complicated theoretic perspectives offered by this work a complement to more empirical work done on the Bakken by myself and my colleagues over the past decade.

What Time Is This Place (Part 2)

This past weekend, I put aside some of my irrational qualms about reading an older book and dove head first into Kevin Lynch’s What Time Is This Place? (MIT 1972). I was stunned by how prescient the book appeared to be, and in my post yesterday started to observe how nearly every chapter explored issues that tangentially related, in some way, to my own research and interest.

I’ll continue that practice today starting with chapter 6. 

6. Boston Time. This chapter is a photo essay that starts with images of clocks in Boston before proceeding to trace the changing character of the city as it represents the changes in Boston time. The opening images invariably reminded me of Scott W. Schwartz’s new book, The Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape (2022) which I blogged about here. Schwartz notes the prevalence of clocks and temperature displays in cities and parallels the experience of time with temperature. Both tend to be represented in absolute (or at very least numerical) terms, but experienced in physical ways. As I write this its -5° F outside here, which is quite cold but not terribly unusual for this time of year. Such consistently low temperatures makes the 30° F days we experienced late last week feel downright balmy. In the same way that the 45 minutes that I’m waiting for the Eagles playoff game to start (I’m writing this on a Sunday), will speed along provided I continue to try to finish this blog post. If I were to put aside my computer, time would slow to a drag.

7. Change Made Visible. The chapter on the ways in which changes are visible, reminded me a good bit of my work with students on the Wesley College Documentation Project. In this project, we documented two buildings on campus between their abandonment and their demolition. The buildings were laced with evidence for the passage of time both in the ways that they were adapted over their century of use to the immediate decisions their most recent residents made when they decamped for the final time. At the end of our work in the building — immediately before asbestos mitigation began — we put on a concert in building’s former recital hall. The weeks before the buildings’ scheduled demolition, we had a short ceremony recognizing their memorial function on our campus. These events made the passage of time visible. You can see some of the work here.

8. Managing Transitions. In his chapter on managing transitions, it is hard to avoid thinking of the recent work on migrants of various kinds. In some ways, Lynch seems to anticipate some of the ways in which we thought about the spaces of “man camps” in Western North Dakota during the Bakken boom. These camps embodied a landscape caught in a kind of transition between low density rural settlements and the concentrated workforce necessary to support extractive industries. The ephemerality of the oil industry presented a landscape that we always only transitioning and contingent. The communities of the Bakken struggled to manage the contingency of the boom in part because the landscape preserved so little from previous booms to remind these communities how they adapted to the stress of demographic change. Elsewhere in the world the architecture of migration reflected the transitional state that migrants often find themselves as they depart economically, environmentally, or politically compromised homes and seek new ones.  

9. Environmental Change and Social Change. One way that Lynch’s work shows its age is when he talks about environmental change. In the 21st century, our mind naturally turn to thoughts about climate change rather than changes in our built environment. Lynch remains optimistic that build environments can transform social experiences. I’ve been watching my institution try to transform campus culture through architecture over the last decade. For example, the university has changed most classrooms into active learning type spaces and, as a result, students (and faculty) have come to expect both active learning and teaching techniques suited to these spaces. Alternately, the campus has invested in architectural forms and spaces designed to promote informal gathering, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a consistent sense of campus. I’ve suggested that these two impulses — student space and a consistent campus — are not necessarily complementary. 

10. Some Policies for Changing Things. Kevin Lynch made his name as an urban planner so it is hardly surprising that he concludes this book with some reflections on policy. The most compelling of these is that suggestion that we think more deliberately about the temporary rhythms and routines we expect of our students and peers. As someone who is unnaturally preoccupied with synchronizing my own schedule with clock time, I have to admit that I’d struggle with a policy that allows greater freedom for individuals to organize their lives according to different temporal rhythms. That said, I don’t think it would be bad for me to have to encounter that. Even little things like allowing students to turn in papers in their own time and developing the patience to deal with people and processes that operate on different times serve as useful reminders that I should not reduce time to a fungible commodity, but as a deeply personal form of social experience. 

Reading an older book as a way to become aware of how the passage of time enriches and transforms how we read and understand a classic text is a wonderful reminder that as creatures of the present, we are never quite free from the past and recognizing the different rhythms of life and senses of time that operate around us should not be a burden. Instead, experiences different senses of time should enrich our experiences and our ability to appreciate our world.

Three Things Thursday: Survey, Oil, and Mild Anarchism

Every now and then, life happens in threes and that makes me wonder whether I’m blogging about my life or I’m simply living out a series of blog posts. In some ways, I suppose, it doesn’t matter, but it sure makes three things Thursday a bit easier.

My next few days will be focused (such as I can at all these days) on these three things:

Thing the First

My old survey buddy David Pettegrew has put together an article that offers a preliminary analysis of the Medieval material from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. This is a pretty exciting piece for two reasons. First, at some point in the distant past, it was originally intended to be a chapter of his soon to be completed book on the material from EKAS. When it dropped out of that volume, it wandered a bit in the wilderness before he found a home for it. 

Because these are hectic times for all of us, and writing about archaeology in the best of situations often takes a village, I offered to help get this article into final shape. One of the things that I’m working on is adding hyperlinks to the EKAS data in Open Context. This will allow the reader to drill down into the data from the article text, validate David’s arguments, and ask new questions from the raw material. This could mean looking at the data spatially in new ways, aggregating new assemblages based on material fro the same survey unit, or even connecting this data to other publicly available data sets. 

With David’s permission, I’ll share some of the linked assemblages new week.

Thing the Second

Last year, I wrote a short piece on the archaeology of petroleum production. My buddy Kostis Kourelis is pretty sure that the archaeology of oil will be next big thing. Oil is not only the quintessential modern hyper object, but also represents a type fossil for supermodernity. My article mostly just scratched the surface of the potential of an archaeology of oil as a key component of archaeology of the contemporary world as well as the kind of critical archaeology that offers new ways of understanding the modern age.

Part of the reason for this is because the article is destined for some kind of handbook of the archaeology of plastics. In fact, the editors and reviewers patiently pointed out, my article needed to connect oil and petroleum production to plastic more explicitly throughout. This was a fair point and I’ve been nibbling away at their helpful comments. 

In many ways, their urging that I connect petroleum production to plastics was more than just appropriate for the volume, but also useful for reconsidering oil and petroleum production as the definitive phenomenon of the supermodern world. The ubiquity of plastics in our everyday life is just one example of oil’s central place in our contemporary society. That said, plastic manufacturing and petroleum production rely on shared spatial footprints. The profoundly toxic sites of petroleum refineries attract similarly toxic petrochemical manufacturing plants that churn out the stock from which most new plastics are made. These plastic pellets then find their way into the world through some of the same infrastructure as our gasoline, heating oil, and other forms of petroleum that we use as fuel. In other words, plastic and oil share more than chemical DNA, but also leverage the same infrastructure that allows both to be always at hand in the contemporary world. Stay tuned for a plasticized draft.

Thing the Third

The third thing that I’m working on with a mid-February deadline is the revision of an article on a class that I taught as the centerpiece of the Wesley College Documentation Project. The article celebrated (I admit) the prospects of a “mildly anarchist” pedagogy that undermined the increasingly bureaucratized nature of both the modern university and archaeology as an industry. It attempted to embrace many aspects of slow, punk, and anarchist archaeology. Unfortunately, it also appears to have captured some of the more traditional elements of writing about archaeology as well. Namely the congratulatory nature of so many fieldwork publications that elevates the archaeologist from the deeply collaborative space of archaeological knowledge making to the august heights of heroic truth teller. 

This, of course, was the opposite of what my paper was intending to accomplish. I was hoping to celebrate the remarkable creativity that occurred over the course of a spontaneous, place-based, research program freed from much of the administrative oversight that can stifle the simply joy of wandering an abandoned place, thinking about the past, and working together to make sense of a building and its history.

That all said, the reviewers were probably doing me a favor by telling me to temper my congratulatory tone and do what I can to ground my excitement for the project in the dusty and incomplete world of reality. The last thing I want to do is to alienate a reader or conform to some kind of stereotype of ego-driven, tenured, middle aged, truth teller. Stay tuned for an updated and tempered draft. 

The Bakken Buzz: Settler Colonialism, Uncertainty, and Dominion

Last week, I mentioned a growing buzz about the Bakken in academic works. Perhaps this is the lag between the Bakken boom and scholarly output. 

This weekend, I read Nestor L. Silva’s very recent Stanford dissertation, “Bakken Ecology: The Culture and Space of Fracked Farmland in North Dakota” (2022). It’s good and thought provoking as any dissertation should be.

He argues that settler colonialism created and relies upon the belief that the uncertainty of living in the Bakken (or western North Dakota more broadly) is manageable by controlling human and material variables. Thus Silva located “dominion” associated with settler conquests as the by-product of efforts to manage the uncertain landscape by controlling independent population, adapting to new ecologies, and ultimately balancing between local knowledge (and control) and non-local sources of authority and power. Silva’s dissertation draws on interviews and his personal experiences in Bakken and offers deep perspectives on how companies, local residents, and visiting researchers encountered the boom-time landscape.

There are five things that caught my attention.  

1. Soil. One of the most interesting chapters of the dissertation deals with the Pedersen family whose farm near Tioga was the site of one of the largest terrestrial oil spills in US history when a Tesoro pipeline dumped millions of gallons of oil on the land. Tesoro funded a massive clean up that involved literally cleaning the topsoil of the farm and redepositing it. The Pedersen family recognized that it would be difficult to discern the outcome of this process until long after the cleanup was complete. That said, they have confidence that the productivity of their fields would be restored either through technology or through some kind of financial settlement.

Silva does a great job of locating dominion not in some kind of abstract conceptual space of territories or law, but in the actual soil itself.  

2. Pipelines. Silva’s discussion of the role of soil as the location for settler dominion in the Bakken extends beyond spill sites. He was particularly sensitive to the role that pipelines play in creating networks of dominion through the Bakken. He notes the tension between the claims that oil companies make the use of pipelines is a “greener” alternative to using trucks and even rail to transport Bakken crude. Silva didn’t overstate and lovely irony of this claim, nor did he overstate the role that pipelines play in making the vagaries of rail traffic more certain for oil producers.

He does note that the construction of pipelines requires the careful removal and replacement of soil. In the semi-arid climate of western North Dakota where soil chemistry is a fragile and inexact science. Even the removal and return of the same soil can cause dramatic decreases in productivity for these areas. This uncertainty requires constant attention on the part of the pipeline builders and farmers. It is not, however, seen as a liability of pipeline building, but as a technical problem that can be solved to ensure that movement of oil and the continued productivity of the soil. 

3. Management and Safety. The third chapter of Silva’s dissertation dealt with the way in which companies operating in the Bakken sought to manage the risk and uncertainty present on job sites. He examines his own experiences with OSHA training and his visit to an “active” (although paused for their visit) fracking site with students and faculty from UND.

He examines how OSHA training transferred the responsibility for on-site safety from OSHA or even the company, to the individual who was responsible for not only keeping themself safe but also making sure that the work site remained in compliance with safety standards. Silva might have even gone a step further in understanding that unlike earlier forms of extractive industries, such as mining, where organized labor sought to manage uncertainty for workers (and potentially companies alike), oil companies shunned unions and instead managed the uncertainty associated with potential litigation or even legal penalties associated with accidents by creating an almost impossibly obscure network of subcontractors which isolated the oil companies themselves from the workplace.

At the same time, Silva notes that by making the individual responsible for their own safety, they recognize that individuals introduce unmanageable levels of uncertainty into the system. The response of oil companies to this uncertainty is to isolate responsibility within the worker and then insulating the worker within complex layers of bureaucratized authority.   

4. Uncertainty and Bakktimism. When Bret Weber and I were talking to folks in the Bakken, we coined a phrase called Bakktimism which represents the unwavering optimism that we encountered across the Bakken even when the boom itself started to falter. We never, as far as I remember, connected this to settler colonialism. Silva’s dissertation proposed that a belief in the ability of settler society to manage uncertainty was at the heart of this Bakktimism. In other words, Bakktimism isn’t the confidence that things would improve, but rather that economic, demographic, and social paroxysm that characterized a boom-time environment would somehow be normalized.

If we ever get to thinking more about Bakktimism, it would be great to look at our interviews through the lens that Silva established. My feeling is that we’ll find plenty of material to support Silva’s view of settler dominion.    

5. Ecologies, Environments, and Ontologies. As an archaeologist, I tend to get preoccupied with the so-called “ontological turn” and efforts to obviate the historical boundaries between human and the material, the social and the natural, and the environmental and political (among many others). Silva’s dissertation dispensed with this academic parlor game by simply assuming that humans, the soil, territory, oil, and institutions exist within the same space. More than that, settler colonialism relied and relies on the continuous negotiation and hybridization of these blurry concepts in the name of managing uncertainty.

 

One last thing about this dissertation, it has a CC-By-NC license which hopefully means that it finds its ways into the hands of scholars and communities who appreciate it critique with as little friction as possible!

Three Things Thursday: Punk is Next, Buzz about the Bakken, and Hanging Out!

There’s a lot of stuff going on these days and I suppose it is better than getting bored, but it sometimes results in me feeling a bit scattered. Today’s “Three Things Thursday” is a reflection of my scattered feeling. I’m know some of this stuff means something to me and hopefully you’ll find it at least vaguely interesting.

Thing the First

Aaron Barth posted something on social media about distributing posters for our conferences on punk archaeology in January 2013. I figured this was a memory of a memory or something, but sure enough, punk archaeology is ten years old this year.  

For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember. Punk archaeology was this alternative conference, event, concert, gathering in Fargo, North Dakota. It produced a book and for a brief moment on one very cold and still night, an intense feeling of community. 

I’m not sure that it produced anything else. Maybe that’s all it was meant to do. Or maybe it could have produced something more tangible and substantial. It seems like ten years out is a good time to reflect on it.

Thing the Second

Resource booms are, by definition, abrupt and short lived. They strike communities that are unprepared and often dissipate before they’re completely understood. In fact, part of what makes booms so damaging and confusing is their unpredictability. Unfortunately, scholars often struggle to research unpredictable, abrupt, and short-lived events. Academic research agendas are like big ships or trains which take a long time to gain momentum, stop, or turn.

There’s been a bit of lag between the peak of the Bakken oil boom and scholarship designed to interrogate, unpack, and even understand it. I’m very much looking forward to Kyle Conway’s forthcoming book on Bakken hospitality. I’m also eager to read Mary E. Thomas’s and Bruce Braun’s edited collection Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil which should appear in coming weeks (paperback apparently in April)!   

I was very excited to be told about the completion of Nestor L. Silva’s Stanford dissertation, “Bakken Ecology: the Culture and Space of Fracked Farmland in North Dakota” (2022). Unfortunately, it is embargoed for two years, but I am dying (well, not literally) to get my hands on a copy of it.

If you have a contact at Stanford who can help me get a copy, I’d be very grateful!   

Thing the Third

Finally, I’m pretty excited for my friend Sheila Liming’s book to come out next week. The book is called Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time and she agreed to chat about it a bit over at the NDQ blog.

Check it out here.

Bakken Babylon: Complete Draft

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a more casual paper for a special section in an issue of Near Eastern Archaeology on the relationship between the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota and Babylon in Mesopotamia. 

I now have a completed draft of this paper. 

At the risk of jinxing everything, I suspect that this paper is essentially unpublishable in its current state, but it is also one of the most fun papers that I’ve ever invest the time to write.

I’ve included a number of almost random photos that rank among my favorite from my years of work in the Bakken. 

Check out the paper and, if you can’t make sense of it, stay for the photos at the end.

As per usual, any and all feedback is appreciated! 

Thomas Barger and the Archaeology of Oil

This past week, I was doing some light research at UND Chester Fritz Library’s Department of Special Collections and for various, almost random reasons, was scrolling through the finding aid for John Barger’s papers.

In those papers, I noticed an entry for Box 1, Folder 31: “Greek Inscriptions Deciphered” by Thomas Barger. I knew Thomas Barger, John’s brother, from my Bakken Babylon paper. Thomas Barger was the North Dakota born and educated CEO of Aramco (Arab-American Oil Company). I knew something about from Wallace Stegner’s book Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil where he appears as one of the first American “petro-nomads” who helped discover the massive Ghawar oil field in the 1950s. By the 1960s he had become the CEO of Aramco and helped the company develop into one of the largest oil companies in the world. 

He was well-known in the industry as a hands-on leader who understood the discovery, extraction, and processing of oil and the men, women, and families who did this work. He was recognized both for his possibly misguided efforts to encourage home ownership among his Saudi employees as well as his ability to speak Arabic and respect for Arabian history and culture. I was not, however, aware of his interest in archaeology.

The publication that appeared in John Barger’s papers was a short update about finds from the Nabatean outpost of Meda’in Salih in northwestern Saudi Arabia which appeared in 1969 in Archaeology magazine. Barger had published an earlier report on this site in Archaeology in 1966. The 1969 article revealed the decipherment of a Greek inscription by Glen Bowersock associated with the Third Cyrenaican Legion traditionally stationed at Bosra, but in this case standing guard over the trade routes at the very edges of the Roman world. This inscription found its way into Thomas Barger’s personal collection and which in 1969, he turned over to the Harvard Semitic Museum which, in turn, transferred it to the T.C. Barger Collection at the National Museum in Riyadh in 2001. The inscription’s nomadic route from Meda’in Salih to Boston and back to the Arabian peninsula reversed the route of Barger’s own travels to the Arabian desert.

This is a nice example of how contemporary petronomadism, a term coined, I think, by Reza Negarstani in his Cyclonopedia (or perhaps Gilles Chatelet in his To Think and Live Like Pigs [1998]) traces both the economic landscape of the Middle East and the archaeological. This is similar to an observation offered by Rachel Havrelock in her “The Ancient Past that Oil Built” in the context of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline in the 1930s. 

On a more local level, one imagines that the work done to support extractive industries here in North Dakota has contributed to the discovery of similarly interesting archaeological landscapes. In that sense, the work of Barger in Saudi Arabia has parallels in his home state of North Dakota where pipelines, roads, rail projects, and refineries have created a contemporary window into both a modern present and historical past.