Industrial Heritage & Archeology at Michigan Tech
The key features of the program are the integration of the history of technology with historical archeology to produce a strong emphasis upon the material culture of industry. This approach is evident in the composition of the faculty, the structure of the curriculum, and the research undertaken. The intellectual basis of our attention to material culture can be found in the work of scholars such as Henry Glassie, Thomas Schlereth, and Kenneth Ames, but it also is informed by researchers oriented to technology, including David Kingery, Patrick Malone, Robert Gordon, and Steven Lubar. Both the annual field school and individual courses offer means of connecting this academic material to the real world of field research.
In the doctoral program, we add to these concerns significant attention to industrial heritage, an emerging area of interest in which some fundamental issues remain to be worked out. Several scholars have problematized the very idea of heritage, offering a range of concerns. Some have been openly critical of the whole idea, emphasizing episodes such as the "Enola Gay" fiasco at the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum to demonstrate how heritage considerations misappropriate history for political and business purposes. Historian Mike Wallace has been especially forceful in this regard. David Lowenthal has offered perhaps the most thoughtful critique, beginning with his book, The Past is a Foreign Country. More recently, Lowenthal observed in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History that "All at once, heritage is everywhere--in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace --in everything from galaxies to genes. It is the chief focus of patriotism and a prime lure of tourism. One can barely move without bumping into a heritage site." (p. xiii). At the core of his critique is the call to recognize the important distinction between history and heritage --a point that often is overwhelmed by the needs of politicians, business, and media. In an article in the Park Service's journal CRM, he calls for stewardship that "tempers[s] the clamorous demands of the immediate present with a compelling rationale for the claims of both the past and the future" [vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 11].
Michigan Tech's doctoral program seeks to educate professionals who can work across this divide between history and heritage. The program combines history and archeology in ways that link sites, artifacts, and documents through extended research projects. We hope to educate such stewards for history and heritage by continuing to impress upon them ideas and approaches from other fields. In the process, we believe we can help define heritage studies as an academic domain.
Some approaches are suggested by the emergence of concepts such as ecology and landscapes, which have been adapted by many social scientists because of their analytical utility. Such insights, argues IA scholar Fred Quivik in a recent article in IA, are especially promising for industrial archeology, as they force attention to the overall picture and away from single elements. “We can now not only illuminate how machines worked or were made but also how workers interacted with each other or their bosses, for example, based on the patterns of buildings people developed to carry out those interactions” (vol. 26, no. 2 (2000): 56). A focus on landscapes, Quivik argues, is a central lesson to be drawn from environmental historians. In the end, we believe our program offers a new research agenda for scholarship on material culture that spans the boundary between history of technology and industrial archeology, even while touching on such related fields as architectural and environmental history, historic preservation, and cultural anthropology and historical archeology.
