The Archaeology of Class War: The Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914

10. Archaeology and Workers’ Memory

311 10 10 The Ludlow Project is an explicitly political project, an attempt to fuse scholarly labor with working-class interests (Ludlow Collective 2001:95). The goal of working with union members and organized labor, an audience outside the traditional realm of archaeology, confronts us with a history little studied by archaeologists and little taught within general historical education. The Ludlow Massacre, like many historical episodes, is a silenced history, written out to the margins of national history. The Ludlow Massacre helped change the lives of working-class people throughout the United States, so its absence in official history, and the absence of events like it, is in some sense astonishing, though unsurprising. Although for most of us on the project it was a “silenced history,” for union members and communities in southern Colorado it is anything but silent. The United Mine Workers of America bought the site after the massacre, erected a monument there, and commemorates the massacre annually. Ludlow is a memory that is mobilized on behalf of striking workers throughout the United States, but it is especially powerful in southern Colorado. Before we began our work at Ludlow, the project principals were questioned by district officials about their political beliefs (Walker 2003) and were challenged at union Archaeology and Workers’ Memory MArk WAlker M A r k W A l k e r 312 local meetings over the project (Duke and Saitta 1998). After the archaeological work began, we were invited to speak at union halls, and a spur-of-the-moment exhibit we put together to show at the 1999 commemoration has been used by Pueblo steelworkers and as part of a United Auto Workers organizing effort in Tennessee. The United Mine Workers Journal published updates on our work to keep union members informed. The monument was recently vandalized, but within a remarkably short period enough money had been contributed for a full restoration (Green 2004; McGuire 2004). Although organized labor is our primary focus, interest in our work has extended beyond this audience, at least in the Colorado area. In short, we find ourselves crossing from one setting where Ludlow is unknown to another in which the history is anything but silent—noisy, contested, and jealously guarded. We knew we would be confronted with a strong historical memory that has an importance that extends beyond academic concerns, so from the very beginning the politics of the project lay in acknowledging archaeology not just as history or science but as memory (Ludlow Collective 2001:96). This chapter addresses this aspect of the project, attempting to define memory and why it is important and highlighting some of the issues archaeologists face when working in “sites of memory” (Nora 1989). Defining MeMory Memory has become a topic of much recent scholarly interest, but it is still a difficult, indeed a slippery, concept. Memory is a complex integration of diverse forms of understanding, a diffuse concept that resists simple categorization. It is a substantial topic of discussion within neurobiology, psychology, literary criticism , and art, as well as in more historically oriented disciplines such as history, anthropology, and archaeology. Discussions of memory can thus range from descriptions of neurochemical processes to abstract discussions of national or even supranational character. In spite of its vagueness, it is nonetheless an important concept, conveying popular understandings of the past. Memory and history (in the sense of the historical disciplines, which include archaeology) are often opposed in the literature, yet they bleed into each other and interact in such ways that boundaries are not easily drawn. Attempts to draw out oppositions between memory and history often seem to circle back on each other as shifting senses of each meaning are used. For example, for some authors the private world of memory is marked off against the public world of officially sanctioned history (Hamilton 1994; Popular Memory Group 1982), while for others or even for the same authors the collective public world of memory is set against the ivory tower of academia (Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1950; Hamilton 1994; Thelen 1990; Trouillot 1995). Archaeology and Workers’ Memory 313 As noted, distinctions between the practices of memory and history are not easily drawn. Natalie Davis and Randolph Starn (1989:2) have noted that many discussions of memory and history mirror the opposition between nature and culture, with the natural and organic flow of memory opposed to the calculated accounts of historians. Pierre Nora (1989) has...