The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca
The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca
The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca
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<strong>The</strong> industrial revolution<br />
• 283 •<br />
McCutcheon 1980), and a formal Industrial<br />
Monuments Survey is now housed with the RCHME<br />
in Swindon. <strong>The</strong> Council for British <strong>Archaeology</strong><br />
also took an early initiative by establishing an<br />
Industrial <strong>Archaeology</strong> Research Committee to look<br />
at listing and protecting industrial sites, and today<br />
the Association for Industrial <strong>Archaeology</strong> promotes<br />
the subject and publishes a journal devoted to the<br />
subject. Interest in industrial archaeology <strong>ca</strong>nnot be<br />
separated <strong>from</strong> the broader conservation agenda, and<br />
Historic Scotland, CADW and English Heritage as<br />
well as the National Trust are all active in the field<br />
(Palmer and Neaverson 1995).<br />
<strong>The</strong> scope <strong>of</strong> industrial archaeology has never<br />
been clearly defined: it may refer on the one hand to<br />
the archaeology <strong>of</strong> industry <strong>of</strong> all periods, whether<br />
prehistoric or modern, and on the other, to all <strong>of</strong><br />
the archaeology <strong>of</strong> the period <strong>of</strong> the industrial<br />
revolution, whether it be country houses, industrial<br />
sites, railway locomotives or the growth <strong>of</strong> cities<br />
(Figure 16.1). <strong>The</strong> term ‘histori<strong>ca</strong>l archaeology’ is<br />
widely accepted abroad but not commonly used in<br />
<strong>Britain</strong>, as it is <strong>of</strong>ten argued that archaeology <strong>of</strong> all<br />
<strong>of</strong> the past 2,000 years is to some extent dependent<br />
upon written sources. In this chapter, the term<br />
industrial archaeology is used to refer to the<br />
Figure 16.1 Study <strong>of</strong> industrial archaeology is <strong>of</strong>ten<br />
archaeology <strong>of</strong> the late second millennium AD—<strong>of</strong><br />
associated with museums. <strong>The</strong> entrance to Beamish Museum.<br />
the period during and after <strong>Britain</strong>’s industrial Source: Kate Clark<br />
transformation. No end date has been chosen, and<br />
even the archaeology <strong>of</strong> the twentieth century is a<br />
new area, where relatively little archaeologi<strong>ca</strong>l research has yet been undertaken (Trinder 1993).<br />
Current perceptions and outstanding problems<br />
If archaeology is seen in terms <strong>of</strong> explicitly archaeologi<strong>ca</strong>l field methods, i.e. the use <strong>of</strong> stratigraphy<br />
and the rigorous analysis <strong>of</strong> physi<strong>ca</strong>l evidence in time and space, then one attempt to meet this<br />
ideal might be cited. A survey <strong>of</strong> the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire (Alfrey and Clark 1993), set<br />
out to explore the use <strong>of</strong> archaeology in understanding a complex lands<strong>ca</strong>pe over several hundred<br />
years. <strong>The</strong> survey brought evidence for buildings <strong>of</strong> all types—vernacular, polite, industrial and<br />
commercial—together with the archaeology <strong>of</strong> the lands<strong>ca</strong>pe in which they were set, and used<br />
methods <strong>of</strong> lands<strong>ca</strong>pe analysis to show the way in which the area changed <strong>from</strong> the medieval<br />
period to the present day, and to provide a context for some <strong>of</strong> the best known developments in<br />
the industrial period. <strong>The</strong> strength <strong>of</strong> the methodology was that it was possible to go beyond the<br />
traditional concept <strong>of</strong> the site to look at lands<strong>ca</strong>pe as an entity; the weakness <strong>of</strong> the-work has<br />
been cited as the resource impli<strong>ca</strong>tions <strong>of</strong> such intensive study. One <strong>of</strong> the themes that emerged<br />
<strong>from</strong> the work was that even in an area said to be the ‘cradle <strong>of</strong> the industrial revolution’, adaptation<br />
and reuse <strong>of</strong> sites, the approach <strong>of</strong> make do and mend, predominated throughout its history.<br />
Innovations such as the first iron bridge (Figure 16.2) have to be seen in the context <strong>of</strong> a preexisting<br />
lands<strong>ca</strong>pe and not as isolated events.