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Historians Reveal the Working Class
a quarterly public
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Vol. 14 No. 1
A Rare Look at Chimney Rock
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Mike Toner’s article “Working to Reveal the Working Class” (Spring 2010) would have readers believe that “historical accounts of the rise of American industry have often overlooked its effects on ordinary workers.” These words may help industrial archaeologists feel good about themselves, but they aren’t true. The last two generations of historians, prompted by the powerful idea of “bottom-up” history, have given us a five-foot shelf of sophisticated studies of workers’ lives that offer far more than the horseshoes, bottles, and teacups that randomly turn up at digs. An excellent place to start is Tamara Hareven’s classic Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City, which has been available since 1978. Robert Dykstra Worcester, Massachusetts
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Sending Letters to American Archaeology American Archaeology welcomes your letters. Write to us at 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517, or send us e-mail at tacmag@nm.net. We reserve the right to edit and publish letters in the magazine’s Letters department as space permits. Please include your name, address, and telephone number with all correspondence, including e-mail messages. american archaeology
Chimney Rock’s Lookout Tower I enjoyed the Chimney Rock story “A Once In A Lifetime Dig” in your Spring 2010 issue. I thought your readers might be interested in a little background about the lookout tower shown on pages 20 and 21. The tower was originally built in the late 1930s for the purpose of wild fire detection in the surrounding area. Stones from the neighboring ruins were used in the construction of the tower’s base. By 1960, it was no longer in use, and in 1974 the cab (the upper part used for observation) fell into disrepair and was dismantled. In 1988, the cab was rebuilt for use as an observation tower for the archaeological site. According to the Durango Herald, the lookout will be dismantled this coming fall. Colorado currently has six fire lookout towers in active use. While the archaeological value of the Chacoan ruins is undeniable, fire lookouts are also important to our history. They are symbols of forest conservation in America and are deserving of our recognition as well. Susan Epstein Web Manager Colorado/Utah Chapter, Forest Fire Lookout Association
Editor’s Corner I knew little about the history of Jamaica when I decided to cover an excavation in Kingston that examined slavery there as well as in other Caribbean islands and parts of the United States. (see “An Examination of Slavery,” page 12). The project is a collaboration between the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), based at Monticello, Virginia, and the University of the West Indies Mona campus in Kingston. DAACS’ archaeologist Jillian Galle led a field school crew consisting primarily of Jamaican students who excavated the Mona and Papine fields on the university’s campus. Long ago, enslaved Africans were brought to Jamaica by the British to work on sugar and coffee plantations, and the slave quarters for two of those sugar plantations were once found on the Mona and Papine fields. Jamaica’s sugar, coffee, and slave labor made the island one of the British Crown’s most valuable possessions. All slavery was brutal, but, according to Galle, sugar plantation slavery was exceptionally so. African slaves greatly outnumbered their white masters and, over time, as slavery was abolished, they, and their descendants, took control of the country. Prior to working on the project, several of the Jamaican students were unaware that, on the very place they’re receiving the education that will allow them to pursue their dreams, their ancestors were condemned to lives of servitude.The sherds, buttons, and other artifacts the students are extracting from the ground speak volumes of this hard, shameful history. Archaeology is rarely so personal.
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