Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology

17. The Production Process as Sensory Experience: Making and Seeing Iron in Colonial New England

351 17. The production process as sensory experience: making and seeing iron in colonial New England Krysta Ryzewski Abstract: Making objects, whether by wrought or mechanized techniques, is now and was in the past a multisensory affair, but a challenge exists as to how to identify and interpret these sensory acts of production in archaeological materials. Using examples from colonial-period iron production sites in New England, this discussion demonstrates how archaeological assemblages may be uniquely suited to address the social, material, and sensory complexities of craft production. Written documentation of metal (and other) production processes is often limited in its description of craft operations, which were largely guided by tactile engagements, sensory cues, and experience. Differential access to and command over these bodies of practice by those who participated in and observed iron manufacture resulted in concomitantly differential multisensory experiences and understandings of the production process. Three points of consideration—the cooperation of the senses, material properties, and performance—are raised here as the basis for questioning how archaeologists might use archaeological materials to access these practice-oriented elements of production. Using a suite of methods drawn from archaeology and materials science, the following examples demonstrate how technological tools allow archaeologists to read evidence of the sensory production process from metals—which act as documents that contain otherwise inaccessible information about the traditions of and engagements with craft technologies. Technique and technology, art and craft, material and social agency, science and the humanities—these relations are often set apart from each other at the outset of archaeological studies of production and technology. The following Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, edited by Jo Day. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 40. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois Univer­ sity. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-8093-3287-8. 352 K. Ryzewski discussion considers sensory engagements and experiences in relation to acts and enactments of the production process, with specific examples from three ironproduction sites in New England (see Dobres 2000; Ingold 2000; Shanks and McGuire 1996). The questions and examples that follow are a brief introduction to thinking about how, by operating beyond these sometimes polarizing distinctions , archaeologists might recognize and learn from the generative movements and highly experiential and sensory processes that were involved in the making of materials that we excavate and study. Colonial Iron Production: Traditions and Innovations Archaeological assemblages are uniquely suited to address the inseparable social and material complexities and textilities of craft techniques, technologies, and associated things (Ingold 2010; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). In considering the relationships between sensory experience and production, this discussion draws on objects excavated and studied from three sites (Figure 17-1) of colonial-period iron production associated with the Greene family from Warwick, Rhode Island: Greene Farm (ca. 1730–1781 c.e.), Potowomut (ca. 1690–1820 c.e.), and Coventry (1742–ca.1800 c.e.). According to historical accounts, no iron-production operations of consequence existed in Rhode Island during the colonial period (Bining 1933). Archaeological excavations and subsequent archival research, however, point to the existence of a thriving iron industry during this period, one that was intentionally omitted from official record keeping (Ryzewski 2008). Iron production in the American colonies was outlawed by the British in 1750 because, like other manufacturers and raw-material processors, the many small industries gradually increased in quantity and output to the point where, by midcentury, the amount of iron that England consumed from North America was notably greater than it produced (Bridenbaugh 1950). The successes of these small-scale and often domestic-based production operations were seen as a threat to the British colonial system because they demonstrated the American colonists’ potential to gain material independence. During the eighteenth century, the British worried that the establishment of home-based manufacturing industries like the Greene iron operations would reduce the colonists’ reliance on British-supplied iron objects. And they did. Although the Iron Act of 1750 did allow colonists to produce bar iron, it stipulated that the raw bar, or pig iron, they produced was to be shipped to England where British forges would produce finished objects to sell back to the colonists at a profit. These objects—farming implements, household utensils, weaponry, anchors, and tools—were basic and utilitarian necessities for the colonists’ survival and everyday affairs in New England. The long turnaround time and the higher cost of obtaining these finished objects from England encouraged many Rhode Island colonists to illegally produce their own...