Preface to special series: postindustrial landscapes, communities, and heritage: special series introduction

Abstract

Archaeologists and heritage scholars increasingly find themselves addressing postindustrial contexts, where ongoing processes of depopulation, ruination, decay, social conflict, environmental damage, and economic stagnation are seen as defining features of the physical and social landscape (High, MacKinnon, and Perchard 2017; Mallach 2018). The unique challenges of working within postindustrial landscapes and in collaboration with the communities that live in and connect to them remain thinly explored and demand greater attention. Understanding the heritage-making process within postindustrial communities is crucial to developing broadly meaningful definitions of the heritage value of such places and must also extend beyond limited, linear narratives of industrial expansion and decline. This special series combines contributions from archaeologists, historians, and heritage scholars drawn from both academic and professional backgrounds for a broad look at current research taking place in postindustrial contexts, highlighting their variety and seeking to draw out common characteristics. The series was inspired by a two-part paper session of the same name presented at the 51st annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in New Orleans in January 2018. The strong response to the call for presenters required two sessions to accommodate, and discussants Melissa Baird and April Beisaw concluded the sessions with a pair of stimulating syntheses. The success of the session inspired the authors to continue this discussion as a special series within the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, with a selection of papers from the original session presented here in published form. As in the conference session that inspired the present series, each of our contributors responds to a pair of key questions: What kinds of distinct challenges do postindustrial landscapes and communities pose to academic and professional archaeologists and heritage scholars? How can engagement and collaboration with the community make archaeology relevant in postindustrial places? A few common themes are immediately apparent. Our contributors each work within a postindustrial traumascape (Tumarkin 2005), a landscape ‘marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’, that has formed as a result of processes of deindustrialization and / or environmental damage and natural disaster. In each paper, the authors identify a complex heritage that serves to both inform community identity and underpin contemporary struggles to engage with and manage the material and socio-cultural legacies of an industrial past that ‘continues to inhabit and refashion the present’ (Tumarkin 2005, 49–50). While the specific themes central to this heritage may differ between papers – they include race, labour conflict, urban renewal, creative destruction, natural disasters, or the cessation of resource extraction – all of them revolve around processes of deindustrialization and attempts by communities to retain, recover, connect with, and restore something that was perceived to have been lost. Each of the places studied by contributors play host to communities whose heritage is strongly influenced by their industrial pasts, and whose future is bound up in discussions about how that heritage informs and facilitates, or obstructs, each community’s present and future aspirations. Operating within this context, archaeologists and heritage scholars are faced with the need to find a useful balance between their own priorities – and biases – and those of a wide range of stakeholders. The series opens with three papers (more will appear in future issues). First, Dan Trepal, Sarah Fayen Scarlett, and Don Lafreniere explore new avenues for collaboration in heritage-making