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. 

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.

Three Things Thursday: Odd and Ends Galore

There comes a time in the semester, especially the spring semester, where I find myself just treading water and trying to keep my head above the waves. This is usually the result of grading, various projects coming in for landings, reading for class, manuscript reviews, and the typical day-to-day work of being alive. It’s during these times, that I turn to my stack of articles, edited volumes, and unfinished side projects and start to think about how I can spend a few minutes here and there making progress without getting so bogged down that I slip beneath the whelming tide.

So here’s what I’m doing to keep myself engaged in things beyond the walls of campus, my email inbox, and my stack of unfinished obligations for others.

Thing the First

I was absolutely thrilled to be included (along with my buddy R. Scott Moore) in the Panayotis Panayides and Ine Jacobs volume, Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology Between Six and Eighth Centuries (2022). This volume was one of those books that came from a conference held a few years ago in the UK, and I have to admit that I typically don’t have much in the way of expectations for these kinds of books.

This book is an exception, though. I’ve been reading around in it over the last week or so, checking out a chapter here and there when I find the time, and I’ve come away thoroughly impressed with both the quality of research that went into these papers and their scope. For example, Pamela Armstrong and Guy Sander’s paper on “Kourion in the Long Late Antiquity: a reassessment” fundamentally re-dated the later phases at this site and showed how their new chronology of well-known Late Roman fine wares will have an impact on our understanding of these centuries. Panayiotis Panayides chapter “Cypriot cities at the end of Antiquity,” pulls together the evidence for Salamis, Nea Paphos, Amathus, and Kourion to argue that the oft-assumed argument for these cities’ decline in the 7th century was, in fact, far more complex. Jody Gordon’s concluding essay, “The ‘fuzzy’ world of Cypriot Long Late Antiquity: continuity and disruption betwixt the global and local,” offers a blueprint for new ways of thinking about these centuries.

This is just scratching the surface of this rich volume. I haven’t had time to read pieces by Luca Zavagno, Marcus Rautman, Athanasios K. Vionis, Olga Karagiorgou, Georgios Deligiannakis, Evangelos Chrysos, and Young Richard Kim! 

Thing the Second

I’ve been really enjoying the gaggle of articles scheduled to appear in the next issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology but now available as “online first” articles from the journal. These pieces are part of an issue coedited by Attila Dézsi and LouAnn Wurst on the theme of “Theorizing Capitalism’s Cracks.” Like the volume on Cyprus in the long late antiquity, I’ve not had time to read everything in this forthcoming issue, but what I’ve read seems pretty great.

Michael Roller’s piece, ““The Song of Love”: An Archaeology of Radio History and Surveillance Capitalism” had me at vacuum tubes, but deftly weaves together archaeological evidence, census data, and history of the radio to argue for its role in creating “machinic consumerism” of the interwar decades and anticipating contemporary surveillance capitalism of the internet age. He also argued that radio had subversive potential as well. The distribution of radio sets in his well-know study site of the coal mining towns of Lattimer, Pennsylvania suggest that immigrant groups listened to the radio collectively rather than as nuclear families in their own homes. More than that, Roller goes on to argue that the emergence f pirate radio stations in the US (and abroad) demonstrates something inherently democratic about this medium. I’m doing this typically dense, nuanced, and thoughtful article a disservice by my description here. If you can check it out.    

There are a few more intriguing pieces in this issue. Eric Drake’s “Envisioning Logging Camps as Sites of Social Antagonism in Capitalism: An Anishinaabe Example from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan” offers a window into Native American life in a Michigan logging camp and show how forms of Native American anticapitalism emerged even in a landscape increasing defined by capitalist extraction. Aaron Howe’s article, “The City and the City: Tent Camps and Luxury Development in the NoMA Business Improvement District (BID) in Washington, D.C.” makes an uncited reference to China Mieville’s novel The City and The City and then presents some of his dissertation research on a homeless encampment in Washington, DC. Rachael Kiddey’s “We Are Displaced, But We Are More Than That: Using Anarchist Principles to Materialize Capitalism’s Cracks at Sites of Contemporary Forced Displacement in Europe,” which I’ve just started reading does what it says on the box! 

Needless to say, I’ll have to steady my hand as I make revisions on my book chapters not to add references to this recent flock of critical and incisive articles. 

Thing the Third

Finally, I’m starting to get excited about a project that started last spring as part of my first effort to teach a graduate seminar in English. Titled, Campus Building, it is a thoughtful and engaged effort to document Merrifield Hall on the University of North Dakota’s campus in the months before it undergoes radical renovations. The layout is done. The content is done. And the volume is almost ready to go to press. 

I can’t wait to share the book and the story behind it with folks here on the ole blog. It is a more than worthy step beyond what I attempted to do with the Wesley College Documentation Project. 

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. 

Bakken Babylon

When I first started working on Cyprus, in 2003 or so, and maybe up to 2008 or 2009, it was pretty easy to avoid being in constant contact with professional colleagues while “in the field.” With COVID accelerating our adoption of technology that allows for remote work, this year I feel like I’m constantly connected to my other responsibilities, for better or for worse, and entangled with other timelines and situations in other places.

This is not a complaint, necessarily. I like remaining involved in my various projects and hearing from colleagues and collaborators when I’m abroad. As I mentioned last week, the intensity of work during field seasons contributes as much to being exhausted as being away from home, eating different food, and having a new routine. Being in contact with my colleagues is a nice way to introduce a bit of home cooking and balance to my life when abroad.

Tomorrow, I’m going to meet with the editors and contributors to a special section of Near Eastern Archaeology on archaeology and climate change. This derived from a panel held at ASOR a number of years ago where I presented some of my research on the Bakken and suggested that it  could contribute to larger discussions on man-made climate change. At the end of the panel, which was quite stimulating, I felt concerned that my research didn’t really fit into what the other papers were trying to do. I was less interested in the climate change in the Near East, for example, and more interested in the social processes associated with the oil industry as a kind of surrogate (or a lens) through which we can consider contemporary climate change.

As part of the zoom conversation tomorrow afternoon, we’ve each been asked to talk for one minute on our proposed papers. I’ve been mucking about with mine over the last few months and have posted some fragments (which you can follow here). For my 1 minute precis, I need to wrangle these into something more coherent. Here’s my current plan:

My paper will use Reza Negrastani’s Cyclonopedia, a work of speculative fiction which offers a brilliant, if obscure meditation on the materiality of oil and the oil industry in the Near East, as a kind of cypher to unpack the relationship between the Bakken and Babylon. This aspect of my paper will be (hopefully) playful, but also have the goal of showing how oil conflates the Bakken and the Near East.

It sets the stage for the second part of my paper which makes this conflation a bit more explicit not only by tracing concepts like “dustism” (and the preoccupation with dust) between the two places but also figures like Thomas Barger, Frank Jungers, and Wallace Stegner whose work connected North Dakota with oil in the Persian Gulf.

The final section will suggest that this conflation of the Bakken (or North Dakota) and Babylon not only emphasizes the globalization of the concept of Babylon, which reverberates through critiques of capitalism and colonialism (and their role as the backbone of oil, climate change, and modernity) as well as a global approach to Near Eastern archaeology.

The Archaeology of Oil Production

I took advantage of the snow day to finish up a chapter that I’m preparing for some kind of volume on the Archaeology of Plastics. My paper was on the archaeology of oil production and it was a nice chance to pull together a bunch of things that I had noticed while doing field work in the Bakken and writing up some of that work.

Without sounding too satisfied, I think this is one of the better things that I have written over the last few years on oil. It’s mostly just a summary, but I feel like it brings together some diverse threads and sets a course of what the archaeology of oil could be in the future.  

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

This chapter surveys broadly the archaeology of oil production with particular emphasis on work in the United States. The first section of the chapter explores efforts to designate sites associated with the discovery, transport, and refining of oil and their related workforce heritage status in the US and elsewhere. The second section considers how the distinctly liquid character of oil produces diverse and dynamic “petroleumscapes” that integrate the various phases of oil production and consumption. The notion of the petroleumscape and other similar ways of understanding human and archaeological landscapes associated with oil production is then applied to the Bakken patch of Western North Dakota in the final section. This area experienced a number of oil booms starting in the 1950s and culmination in the early 21st century boom at which time a team of archaeologists with the North Dakota Man Camp Project documented both workforce housing in the Bakken and the industrialization of the rural landscape.

Here’s a link to the paper.

Three Things Thursday: Dining, Dancing, and Data

It’s been a pretty long week. I managed to teach my two classes via Zoom on Tuesday and made it through my night class face-to-face on Wednesday. Today, I’m bracing for the full slate of teaching and hoping (as much as anything) that the after shocks of my brush with The Omicron remain mild. 

With this as background, I figure my readers likely understand that a Three Things Thursday represents a path of least resistance as I get back up to speed.

Thing the First

Yesterday, I read Yannis Hamilakis’s recent piece in World Archaeology: “Food as affirmative biopolitics at the border: liminality, eating practices, and migration in the Mediterranean.” He argues that food represents a key element in the political discourse of displacement. Food provided to individuals detained on the island of Lesvos served to define their status within the complex network of cultural and social identities present in the Moria camp. Overcooked rice, for example, made some residents understand their status to be as sick patients. Undercooked rice demonstrated a lack of concern by the state, NGOs, and caterers tasked with preparing food. 

As a result, many camp residents took to preparing their own food. They removed the meat from the pre-packaged meals and combined it with spices and other ingredients. They constructed cooking fires and ovens, used their meager cash allowance to buy cooking supplies and spices, and in some cases planted gardens.

This latter practice gave me pause. We were struck by the construction of gardens at work force housing sites in the Bakken oil patch especially during the height of the boom. Recent work on the role of gardens at Japanese internment camps has shown how they served to produce a sense of community in the austerely functional carceral landscape of the camp itself (see for example Bonnie Clark’s book, Finding Solace in the Soil: An Archaeology of Garden and Gardeners at Amache (2020) or Connie Y. Chiang’s Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of Japanese Incarceration (2018) which I blogged about here.) Ann Elena Stinchfield Danis’s 2020 dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, “Landscapes of Inequality: Creative Approaches to Engaged Research” notes the gardens built my residents of the Albany Bulb on the San Francisco Bay (more here). 

If I were to wring a bit more from our research in the Bakken, I would write something about the gardens we observed there and the way in which gardens and outdoor cooking spaces contributed to the creation of domesticity, community, and place making at temporary workforce housing sites.

Thing the Second

I’ve been reading Hanif Abdurraqib latest book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021). The book is good and combines Abdurraquib’s poetic grasp of language with chapters that could easily stand by themselves as independent essays. I particularly enjoy passages where phrases spill out on top of each other connected only by the “&” and conveying the immediacy of his experience without introducing urgency. 

One of the best chapters in the book is titled “On the Certain and Uncertain Movement of the Limbs” and it explores the place of dancing or being able to dance on Black identity. Abdurraquib spills the beans when he tells us that Whitney Houston could not dance and then unpacks her rise as a black woman to pop super star status and how that shaped views of her Blackness. I won’t spoil the chapter or the book for anyone who has yet to read it, but this chapter alone makes it worth the purchase. It’s one of the best things that I’ve read over the past year. 

Thing the Third

 There’s been a good bit of buzz surrounding Piraye Hacıgüzeller, James Stuart Taylor and Sara Perry’s recent article in Open Archaeology: “On the Emerging Supremacy of Structured Digital Data in Archaeology: A Preliminary Assessment of Information, Knowledge and Wisdom Left Behind.” In the article, the authors take some of the narrative notes from the Çatalhöyük Research Project and convert them into structured data using the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. 

The fit is predictably awkward and demonstrates for anyone who remains unconvinced that various structured data schemes always leave some information and even “wisdom” behind. I really like this article because it takes something that’s on the verge of being common sensical – i.e. narrative descriptions contain nuance that most ontologies and data capture models can’t reproduce – and makes it plainly visible. It also fits into a larger critique of “big data” or of just “data” driven analyses both in archaeology, narrowly, and also in contemporary society. I wonder, a bit, whether the COVID pandemic and the constant drone of data driven guidelines lurks in the back of these author’s thinking. There’s something about the limits of data as the basis for the analysis of COVID fatalities, spread, and efforts to mitigate COVID. 

An article like this serves as an interesting reminder that data driven analysis (and decision making) depends on methods of inclusion and exclusion and these decisions prefigured the kind of interpretation possible. Of course, this is known situation and hardly profound, but this article sets it out in the context of archaeology in a particularly elegant way.

The Bakken Outside the Box

Last year, I submitted one of my favorite little articles. It was co-authored with Bret Weber and is called “Bakken Hundreds.” You can read it here.

The article is a contribution to a volume called Archaeology Outside of the Box and we thought our piece would fit the main trust of the volume toward more unconventional archaeological projects and more unusual forms of writing about archaeology. Alas, when the reviews came back, we were told that our article was too far outside the box, but, our editor intervened and suggested that we might satisfy the reviewers with a long footnote. This would allow us to keep the structure of our article intact, while also contextualizing our project more formally. 

Because I’m really focused on other things at the moment, I’m using this blog space to work a bit on this footnote. For the various references, check out the the article here and as always, any and all feedback is welcome!

The North Dakota Man Camp project began in 2012 and sought to document the social, architecture, and archaeological conditions at work force housing sites in the Bakken Oil Patch of Western North Dakota. The project is directed by the archaeologists and historians, William Caraher and Richard Rothaus, and the social worker and historical Bret Weber, and over its seven year history included collaborations with architectural historian and archaeologist, Kostis Kourelis; visual artists, John Holmgren, Kyle Cassidy, and Ryan Stander; and colleagues in social work and history. The project team documented over 50 workforce using textual descriptions, photography, video, and over 100 hours of unstructured interviews with residents. These sites ranged in character from informal and illegal squats in tree lines near construction sites, which we called “Type 3” camps to large RV parks or “Type 2” camps and state-of-the-art camps provided by global logistics companies, which were “Type 1” camps in our typology. The main phase of the project concluded in 2018, but low-level fieldwork is ongoing with periodic visits to Western North Dakota continuing on an irregular basis. 

The 2008-2018 Bakken oil boom was the third such boom in Western North Dakota with earlier booms occurring in the 1950s and late-1970s and early 1980s (Conway 2020). The improvement in of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology in the early 21st-century and the high price of oil (which we included in the following article) encouraged oil companies to return to the Bakken and Three Forks formation. By April 2014, the thousands of Bakken oil wells were producing over one-million barrels of oil per day from sites concentrated mainly in Mountrail, Williams, and McKenzie Counties. The rapid rate of exploration and drilling along with the increase in production, drew tens of thousands workers to the region not only to work in the oil industry directly, but also to work in construction and service industries necessary to support the growing population. As had happened in previous booms, the increase in population outpaced housing and a wide range of temporary housing situations filled the gap (Caraher et al. 2020). 

Our original goal was to document and analyze workforce housing conditions and to produce a dataset that could inform historical and policy studies in the future. Our work in the Bakken, however, revealed more than just creative adaptions to the precarious employment, inadequate housing, and extreme weather. As the following article attempts to communicate, field work in the Bakken was also deeply affecting. The fieldwork team encountered diverse attitudes and situations that reflected the struggles, hopes, and experiences of workers in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the tireless efforts to negotiate the promises of middle-class life against contingencies of the global extractive economy. While our other publications provide a more scholarly view of our work in the Bakken (Weber et al. 2014; Caraher 2016; Caraher et al 2016; Caraher et al. 2017; Caraher and Weber 2017; Caraher et al. 2020; Rothaus et al. 2021), this article seeks to offer an affective view of our experiences in this landscape and serve as a reminder that archaeology, especially of the contemporary world (e.g. Gonzalez-Ruibal 2019) is as much about our critical, reflective engagement with the contemporary situation, as the material context for the present. 

Starting the Final Chapter

This month, I’m starting the final chapter of my short book on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. I’ve blogged a ton about this book and you can read what I’ve written so far here.

The final chapter is a pendant to my first chapter. Just as the first chapter introduced the Alamogordo Atari Expedition of 2014 and anchored my book in the “garbology” of Bill Rathje, the final chapter will use my work in the Bakken oil patch to situate the archaeology of the contemporary world in global questions of precarity and climate change. 

The first few paragraphs follow my usual formula for each chapter as I try to evoke some cultural history to offer a broader context for the archaeology of the contemporary.

So here’s the start to chapter 8, which I’ve tentative titled Extractive Industry, Housing, and Climate Change: 

The first chapter of this book began in 2014 with me standing in a New Mexico landfill documenting the excavation of a deposit of Atari games. The final chapter will begin in 2012 with me standing in an RV park housing workers who have come to western North Dakota during the Bakken Oil Boom. The North Dakota Man Camp Project conducted its inaugural season of fieldwork starting at a dusty camp on the outskirt of Tioga, North Dakota. The town of Tioga calls itself the “Oil Capital of North Dakota” from its perch atop the Nesson Anticline which has produced oil at a commercial scale since 1951 when the Iverson Well #1 came in. Booms in the 1950s and the 1980s brought thousands of workers not only to Tioga, but to the sparsely populated counties of western North Dakota. Invariably, local housing stock proved inadequate to accommodate the influx of workers who resorted to a wide range of temporary, mobile, and ad hoc solutions. The North Dakota Man Camp Project team visited the Bakken over a dozen times to document the various ways forms of boom-time workforce house. Our team combined archaeologists with an architectural historian, a historian and social worker with a specialization in housing, and artists, students, and colleagues committed to the documentation and study of 21st century Bakken oil boom.

The early 21st-century Bakken Oil Boom grabbed international media headlines and introduced the term “man camp” to American vocabulary (Caraher et al. 2016). Alec Soth’s famous photo of an oil smeared worker sitting atop an overturned oil drum on the North Dakota prairie evoked the desolation of the place and the rugged, masculine labor associated with extractive industries. The photo appeared on the cover of the widely circulated New York Times Magazine in 2013 and similar coverage appeared in The Atlantic, Harpers, National Geographic, and the Washington Post at around the same time (Becker 2016). The journalists drawn to the Bakken produced a series of thoughtful books that situated the Bakken in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis and the “Great Recession” and amid the improvements in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technologies, a renewed push to national energy independence and the longstanding hope of getting rich (e.g. Gold 2014; Rao 2018; Briody 2017; McLean 2018). Artists and writers have also looked to the Bakken for inspiration and critique (e.g. Dunham 2016; Brorby et al. 2016; Brorby 2017; Anderson 2017; Sayles 2020). Commercial paperbacks (e.g. Martin 2017) and television series followed playing on the reputation of the oil patch as a kind of new “Wild West” where the potential of the frontier and freedom of lawlessness intersect to produce the ideal backdrop for transgressive tales of violence, capitalism, and wealth.

Needless to say, we encountered very little of the Wild West in our work in the Bakken. Instead, we documented a wide range of efforts to adapt often temporary housing conditions to the North Dakota weather, to expectations developed over the last half-century of suburbia, and to preserve flexibility in the face of the growing precarity of the “gig economy.”

Extractive Industries, Climate Change, and Capitalism in the Bakken

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on my paper for the 2020 ASOR annual meeting. The paper is officially titled “North Dakota and the Middle East: The Bakken Oil Patch in a Global Perspective,” but if I could, I’d change that to “Extractive Industries, Climate Change, and Capitalism in the Bakken.” The paper will appear in a routable called “Archaeology and Climate Change: New Challenges to Fieldwork in the Middle East” convened by Ömür Harmanşah. Since, the roundtable will primarily focus on a conversation among participants, our paper are to be kept short (<10 minutes). Mine is  perhaps slightly long, but I figure I’ll tighten it up a bit before it’s read to go live.

I feel like this paper is the first tentative step toward understanding our work in the Bakken in a new way. If you want to get some broader context on my thinking, I posted a four part series last week that sort of sketched some approaches:

Approach 1: assemblages
Approach 2: flows
Approach 3: fieldwork
Approach 4: history. 

As always feedback, comments, or complaints are always welcome.

“Extractive Industries, Climate Change, and Capitalism in the Bakken”

The archaeology of contemporary climate change has a necessarily global scope, but as Charles Orser famously quipped, archaeologists are generally inclined to “think globally, dig locally” (1996). Since 2012, I’ve worked with a team of archaeologists to document workforce housing in western North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch. While our work has considered workforce housing through the lens of domesticity, colonialism, migration, and the landscapes of work, this will be our first focused effort to think about our project as the archaeology of contemporary climate change. The goal of my very short introduction to our work to consider the relationship between extractive industries, climate change, and capitalism in the Bakken…

At first blush, the Bakken oil patch in western North Dakota appears to have little connection to the Middle East. In fact, the oil booms of the early 1950s, 1980s, and in the 21st century correlate closely with political situations in Middle East, from the first post-colonial moves to nationalize oil production in Iran (1951) and share profits in Iraq (1952), to the nationalization of ARAMCO in 1980 in the aftermath of the 1970s US oil crisis, and the long messy legacy of the Second Gulf War in the 21st century. It is largely a coincidence that two North Dakotans, Thomas Barger and Frank Jungers led ARAMCO in the 1960 and 1970s, but less coincidental that companies like Haliburton and Schlumberger were active in both the Bakken and Middle East, as was Target Logistics, who at one point accommodated 1% of the state of North Dakota’s population in their various workforce housing sites. Of course, the various Bakken oil booms also align with changes in the post-war American economy and society as well, from the rapid expansion of consumer culture, suburbanization, and automobiles in the 1950s to the rise of the gig economy in the aftermath of the “Great Recession” in the 21st century.

The 21st century Bakken boom describes the massive influx of workers into the predominantly rural counties of western North Dakota. The need for workers both in the oil industry and elsewhere in the overheating regional economy exceeded housing capacity and this led to a range of ad hoc and provisional response from both workers and the overwhelmed municipalities.

The stories of workers camping out in the Williston Walmart parking lot and local parks made national headlines. In response to this situation, Williston, the largest city in the Bakken region, approved “man camps” within their expanded jurisdiction to accommodate the influx of workers. National and global logistics companies constructed and managed these facilities to serve the needs of other large companies who sought lodging for shifts of workers arriving in western North Dakota to drill for oil, to build pipelines, or to improve local infrastructure. Additionally, Williams, Mountrail, and McLean counties provided provisional zoning for outside investors seeking to build RV parks for temporary workers without connections to major companies or who were looking for work. The result was a patchwork of over 100 workforce housing sites across the region that provided shelter for workers in a wide range of conditions.

The most elaborate housing sites, such as those erected by Target Logistics, provided clean housing, decent food, and limited amenities to thousands of workers. The single or sometimes double rooms were standardized and workers who came to the region for four or six week shifts had limited opportunities to personalize their space. The public spaces of these camps were plain, but functional, enlivened only by the occasional print of generic patriotic or natural scenes.

The situation in RV parks was more varied and attracted more of our attention. In general, residents owned their RVs and at the height of the boom, RV parks showed a remarkable range of efforts to customize these spaces and adapt them to the challenges of the North Dakota winter. The most elaborate RVs featured not only insulated skirting around the sides, but also fenced yards, gardens, raised walkways, cooking, eating and socializing areas, and storage sheds. Elaborate mudrooms are perhaps the quintessential feature of these units. In their simplest form they constituted a lean-to aligned with the door of the RV where residents could extract themselves from their work and winter gear. Not infrequently they also provided space for storage, additional living space, and transformed the rectangular RV into a L-shaped building that also offered more privacy for their outdoor space.

When we first visited the Bakken we couldn’t escape admiring these innovative efforts to expand and adapt RVs into full time, if temporary residential structures. These architectural adaptations almost led us to overlook the fragility of water and sewage infrastructure in many of these camps, the dust and mud that were constant parts of daily life in the spring, fall, and summer, and the desperate attempts to fortify the RV from the biting North Dakota cold wind. Moreover, by 2015, counties had begun to pass new ordinances restricting how residents could adapt their RVs. They banned skirting that rendered the RV immobile and mudrooms, for example. As the intensity of the boom declined owing to lower oil prices and improved technology in drilling, the number of residents in RV camps declined as well and many camps took on a rougher, more forlorn appearance. Abandoned camps have left their scars on the prairie landscape as gravel pads, buried pipes, and discarded polystyrene, treated wood, wiring, metal, and other detritus complicates returning these sites in agricultural production.

Efforts by temporary workers in the Bakken to personalized their living spaces demonstrated an effort to re-create some of the pleasures of an American suburb even as foreclosures displaced many of the same workers from their suburban homes. Hostile municipalities, the risks associated with work in the oil industry, the volatility of global markets, and the challenges associated with substandard housing, reflected the kind of “structural violence” inherent in capitalism that Michael Roller has associated with life in late 19th century coal towns of western Pennsylvania. In North Dakota, it is notable that restrictions on workforce housing did not accompany efforts to improve workers safety or environmental protection. Throughout the second decade of the 21st century, the Bakken maintained one of the worst records of worker safety in the US and has experienced major spills of both oil and waste water. Alongside these problems, writers have long recognized the violence of hydraulic fracturing, the dominant form of technology used to extract oil from the tight shale of the middle Bakken formation.

Over the last decade, the Bakken has been a center for recent efforts to highlight the relationship between extractive industries and climate change. The protests associated with the Dakota Access Pipeline, which links the Bakken to the Pakota Oil Terminal in Illinois, offered an explosive reminder of the strong ties between colonialism, extractive industries, and the state violence in maintaining our uninterrupted access to petroleum. Our work in the Bakken, at the start of the pipeline, sought to make visible a more subtle indication of these same violence in the housing of the temporary workforce who makes our persistent dependence on fossil fuels possible.

Few can deny that the contemporary climate crisis represents a moment of existential violence for many communities around the world.