Perhaps the problem is the term "industrial".  I will readily admit that there
is a great deal of manufacturing going on.  There is just something that bothers
me about using industrial to discuss a cottage industry.

I think what I was trying to get at in terms of scale was relative measurement.
I am being taken too literally.  It is not necesary that an industrial site
cover acres or hectares.  But it would be hard to argue that a huge site at
which manufacturing took place was industrial.  Likewise, an industrial site
need not employ hundreds of workers.  I think tanneries are probably
industrial.  Altering the landscape is also relative.  The rather large
quantities of pottery Bea describes associated with the salt industry would
probably fit the "alter" definition.

No one would argue with a modern steel plant being an industrial site.  A
village shoemaker, at the other extreme, is probably not.  Somewhere in between
the term industrial ceases to be accurate.  The line of demarcation is at best
fuzzy and will be in different places for different people.  Regardless of where
you draw the line, manufacturing or fabrication is taking place at both.

Bea's description of the manufacturing of salt is interesting.  At some point it
certainly became a salt industry.

Limiting "industrial" to post 17th century is also a mistake.  The problem
probably stems from the historic and economic concept of the Industrial
Revolution.  Industry predated the IR.  There are certainly industrial sites
that are earlier.  A wonderful example is the multiple roman grain mill site in
France (?, see Sci Am).  There are other examples from both the Roman and
pre-Roman world.  There are mining complexes all over the Med and in the UK.  I
don't know much about Asia, but I do know that Korea and China had some major
pottery manufacturing sites that can only be described as industrial.

Although archaeology started out as the study of ancient things, it has grown to
be much more.  A better definition might be the study of man-made artifacts
(including landscapes).  There is nothing that says they have to be old
artifacts.  There have even been very effective excavations of modern
landfills.  Archaeology is also a group of techniques to extract information
from the artifacts and the ground.   I have just submitted a draft MA thesis for
a program at William & Mary in Historical Archeology.  Just because there are
documents doesn't preclude its being archaeology.  My alma mater, U of
Pennsylvania, has an extensive collection of clay tablets from Mesopotamia.
Does that make what was done at Ur and Sumer excavations, rather than
archaelogy.  I don't think so.  Documents are a very valuable adjunct to what
one finds buried in the dirt.

As the saying goes "It was clear as mud, but it covered the ground!"

Jamie Brothers

Jeroen van der Vliet wrote:

> Dear Jamie,
>
> I reply to you off-list because I just read your message and was not paying
> enough attention to all the other contributions to this thread before. If
> you think it does contribute to the thread, feel free to send it to the
> others on the list.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Jeroen van der Vliet
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------------------------------
>
> Jamie wrote:
>
> I agree that cottage industries are important.  The oversized smithy at
> Montpelier
> provided half of the income for the entire plantation.  In instances like
> the boot
> and shoe industry or the more recent sweater industry of Scotland and
> Ireland the
> production is cottage, but the organization/distribution is industrial.
>
> I'm still not convinced that this should be approached as "industrial
> archaeology".
> The sites are essentially domestic.  It is the marketing/distribution
> network that
> needs to be looked at as industrial.
>
> and in an earlier message:
>
> I think whether or not a site is "industrial" depends on a number of
> factors.
> The site must be primarily concerned with an industrial process (mining,
> iron making,
> tanning, etc.).  It must also be industrial in scale.  We are talking more
> than a couple
> of small buildings and areas measured in square kilometers, not meters.
>
> This definition still means that only from the 18th century onwards there
> would have been industrial activities.
> I do not think it is size that matters but more the nature of these
> activities. Clearly the produce from the cottages was not meant for use
> within the small community nor did the cottage workers sell their products
> on a nearby market.
> For example, from the 13th century onwards merchants began to hire cottage
> workers on a putting-out basis (merchants 'put out' the raw material and
> collected the finished products later). The cottage workers became part of
> a larger, sometimes even nationwide, marketing and distribution network.
> The merchants used this system because of cheap labour, an early case of
> outsourcing, because the guilds in the cities had made competition
> impossible by regulating production. This certainly was profitable for most
> craftsmen, but certainly not for enterprising merchants.
> Of course cottage communities were no industrial estates, the main activity
> was agriculture. But the inhabitants did take part in industrial activities
> and because outside the cities there were no constraints on the use of
> female and child labour, a very large part of the community was engaged in
> these activitities.
> I chose 'industrial activities' here because the cottage workers were not
> initiating these activitities themselves, they had quite different reasons
> to participate than the merchants - they needed the money really bad
> because for various reasons they could not live from their primary activity
> agriculture alone - and the network they were part of was not a network
> they had created themselves, you could say they were merely the tools of
> the merchants.
>
> In classical terms industrial activitities are based on nature, labour,
> capital and management. All ingredients are in this case present. This
> would mean we should investigate the industrial aspects of rural
> communities. If a Roman site includes these four ingredients then we could
> be dealing with industrial activities as well.
>
> When written sources do not provide enough information about industrial
> activities in for example Roman or medieval times, and that is the case, we
> need archaeology to find this information. In my view, that should make it
> 'industrial archaeology'.
>
> Jeroen van der Vliet



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