The Excavation of Industrial Era Settlements in North-West England (original) (raw)
Related papers
2003
Whilst the North West of England was one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution, and was at the forefront of the development of the new academic discipline of Industrial Archaeology, there is no overview of the region's industrial archaeology which deals with the landscape and social archaeology approach to the subject. This volume, the second in an occasional series on models and methodology in North West archaeology, brings together many of the leading researchers in the region to present for the first time detailed studies of the landscape and social archaeology of the period. The volume is divided into two sections. The first deals with models and methodologies for approaching the period in North West England. The second part presents a series of five case studies from around the region which show how landscape and social archaeology models and methodologies have been applied from Cumbria and Lancashire through to Greater Manchester, Cheshire, and north-western Derbyshire. These innovative approaches allow us to look at the archaeological monuments, landscapes, and buildings of the Industrial Period from the farm to the factory.
Industrial Archaeology Review
This paper uses 16 years of targeted fieldwork on excavating workers' housing in the Manchester region, UK, to assess a variety of research approaches to the investigation of urban industrial housing of the late 18 th , 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Manchester was one of the 'shock' cities of industrial Britain, and a honey pot for social commentary during the Victorian period. Using data from more than 30 excavation sites it looks at the way in which archaeological evidence can be used to explore issues around house build quality, overcrowding, sanitation and disease, and reconstructing households from their material remains. Manchester's reputation for poor living conditions during the industrialising period was crystalized around the comments of contemporary social commentators from Engels to Gaskell. Yet, the archaeological evidence reviewed in this article demonstrates the value of archaeological approaches in challenging and testing such views through detailed case studies. More importantly, it shows that archaeological material can be used to study directly features of the new industrialised form of urban living, providing a set of research questions applicable across the industrial urban workers' housing of Britain.
'Uncle Tom was there, in crockery': material culture and a Victorian working-class childhood
Childhood in the Past 6 (2): 89-105 , 2013
British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the 'rich and diverse material culture' from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralizing and condemnatory (Giles and Rees Jones 2011, 545-6). Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield (Yorkshire), this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity. Childhood among the British working-classes of the nineteenth century has been extensively researched by historians and literary scholars. Approaches adopted range from broad surveys of social and economic conditions, based on governmental records and other institutional sources, such as those of charitable and educational bodies (e.g. Tuttle 1999; Heathorn 2000; Humphries 2010), to analyses of individual life stories, as recorded in autobiographies (e.g. Vincent 1982) and interviews conducted by social reformers (e.g. Shore 1999). The literature published for children (e.g. Bottigheimer 1996; McGeorge 1998; Shuttleworth 2004) and paintings and photographs of children have been shown to have both reflected and shaped lived experience (e.g. Cunningham 1991; Arscott 2004; Rose 2009). Yet, childhood has largely been overlooked by archaeologists, despite a growing body of work exploring the domestic archaeology of nineteenth-century Britain, which has nuanced the study of industrialisation (e.g. Casella and Croucher 2010; Owens et al. 2010). Childhood did not feature, for instance, in a 2011 volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology dedicated to the archaeology of poverty since the eighteenth century, and is similarly neglected in recent reviews of historical archaeology (e.g. Hicks and Beaudry 2006), unlike in studies of earlier periods where the archaeology of childhood is now well established (e.g.
People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2017
The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.
British archaeologists have long recognised the potential for the archaeology of working-class neighbourhoods to illuminate communities that typically left few direct traces of their own in the written record. They have also emphasised that the 'rich and diverse material culture' from such sites provides alternative perspectives to the textual evidence, which is often moralizing and condemnatory (Giles and Rees Jones 2011, 545-6). Drawing on a case-study from Sheffield (Yorkshire), this paper explores what material culture can reveal about working-class childhoods. It argues that childhood was depicted and experienced at the intersections of the chapel, mine and pub, and that competing conceptions of childhood and family were pivotal to the struggle for working-class identity.