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5 “Movement Archaeology” Promoting the Labor Movement in Maryland robert C. ChideSter DEVELOPINg A “MOVEMENT ARCHAEOLOgy” FOR THE LABOR COMMUNITy I was born and raised in Ohio and went to college there. My undergraduate background was in military archaeology. In the fall of 2002 I moved to Maryland to enter the Masters of Applied Anthropology Program at the University of Maryland at College Park. Being from a decidedly “northern” state, I thought of Maryland as a “southern” state since it had been a slave-holding state. To me, as, I suspect, to many northerners,“southern” was synonymous with agricultural , or non-industrial. I quickly learned, however, how oversimplified a view this is. I began to realize my misperception shortly after I moved to Maryland. I ended up living in the town of Laurel, which is about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. One of the first things I noticed about Laurel was its downtown Main Street area, home to a number of mid-nineteenth-century mill-workers’ duplexes. It turns out that Laurel was a textile mill town developed along the same model as many northeastern mill towns.Then,shortly after I discovered this, I visited a historic georgian mansion museum just across the street from where I was living. There I learned that the mansion’s first owners had made their fortune not in tobacco, as had so many other eighteenth-century Maryland aristocrats, but rather through the production of iron. What’s more, their furnaces were operated primarily with slave labor, a fact that is in marked contrast to the stereotype of agricultural plantation slave labor that has come to dominate the American historical imagination. The more I looked around, the more I realized that there was really an amazingly large amount of industrial history in Maryland. “Movement Archaeology” • 81 Coming to a new school, I had decided that I wanted to learn about something other than military archaeology. I figured I should take the opportunity to learn something new—I just had had no idea what. Laurel gave me the answer : the archaeology of industry and labor. As a border state that was neither completely Northern nor completely Southern,Maryland provides a wonderful opportunity to study a unique trajectory of industrialization and labor history. For a state with so much industrial and labor heritage,however,very few people in Maryland seemed to be aware of this historical legacy. I’ll admit that when I first arrived in College Park, I didn’t really know what applied anthropology was. I did not find my baptism by fire particularly pleasant, and after the first few weeks of class I found myself wondering if I had chosen the right graduate program. By the end of the first semester, however , my opinion had changed. I found the concept of action anthropology particularly appealing. John van Willigen defines action anthropology as “a value-explicit activity” in which “anthropologists attempt to both understand communities and to influence the rate and direction of change within these communities” (1986:59). Rather than the anthropologist taking the role of the benevolent outsider who knows what is best for the community better than members of the community themselves, however, action anthropologists work “in conjunction with community members . . . to discover community problems and to identify potential solutions with continual feedback between its scientific and community subprocesses” (van Willigen 1986:59). According to van Willigen, the two key values of action anthropology are community selfdetermination and scientific validity. This perspective, combined with my new interest in industrial and labor archaeology and the oppressive political and social climate under the george W. Bush administration,led me to the idea of using archaeology to promote public awareness and knowledge of the contributions of the industrial working class to Maryland’s diverse heritage. By extension, I was hoping to contribute to the important democratic message of the labor movement in our often undemocratic society. I thought of my project as an exercise in movement archaeology, a concept adapted from historian James green’s (2000) notion of movement history . According to green, movement history does not simply refer to the historical study of movements for social justice. It also refers to historical scholarship performed specifically with the intention of promoting social causes (green 2000:3)—much like action anthropology. So, with scholarly precedent from the two main fields in which historical archaeologists operate backing me up, I began my attempt to fill a gap in the public perception of Maryland’s history...

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