The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The industrial revolution
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McCutcheon 1980), and a formal Industrial
Monuments Survey is now housed with the RCHME
in Swindon. The Council for British Archaeology
also took an early initiative by establishing an
Industrial Archaeology Research Committee to look
at listing and protecting industrial sites, and today
the Association for Industrial Archaeology promotes
the subject and publishes a journal devoted to the
subject. Interest in industrial archaeology cannot be
separated from the broader conservation agenda, and
Historic Scotland, CADW and English Heritage as
well as the National Trust are all active in the field
(Palmer and Neaverson 1995).
The scope of industrial archaeology has never
been clearly defined: it may refer on the one hand to
the archaeology of industry of all periods, whether
prehistoric or modern, and on the other, to all of
the archaeology of the period of the industrial
revolution, whether it be country houses, industrial
sites, railway locomotives or the growth of cities
(Figure 16.1). The term ‘historical archaeology’ is
widely accepted abroad but not commonly used in
Britain, as it is often argued that archaeology of all
of the past 2,000 years is to some extent dependent
upon written sources. In this chapter, the term
industrial archaeology is used to refer to the
Figure 16.1 Study of industrial archaeology is often
archaeology of the late second millennium AD—of
associated with museums. The entrance to Beamish Museum.
the period during and after Britain’s industrial Source: Kate Clark
transformation. No end date has been chosen, and
even the archaeology of the twentieth century is a
new area, where relatively little archaeological research has yet been undertaken (Trinder 1993).
Current perceptions and outstanding problems
If archaeology is seen in terms of explicitly archaeological field methods, i.e. the use of stratigraphy
and the rigorous analysis of physical evidence in time and space, then one attempt to meet this
ideal might be cited. A survey of the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire (Alfrey and Clark 1993), set
out to explore the use of archaeology in understanding a complex landscape over several hundred
years. The survey brought evidence for buildings of all types—vernacular, polite, industrial and
commercial—together with the archaeology of the landscape in which they were set, and used
methods of landscape analysis to show the way in which the area changed from the medieval
period to the present day, and to provide a context for some of the best known developments in
the industrial period. The strength of the methodology was that it was possible to go beyond the
traditional concept of the site to look at landscape as an entity; the weakness of the-work has
been cited as the resource implications of such intensive study. One of the themes that emerged
from the work was that even in an area said to be the ‘cradle of the industrial revolution’, adaptation
and reuse of sites, the approach of make do and mend, predominated throughout its history.
Innovations such as the first iron bridge (Figure 16.2) have to be seen in the context of a preexisting
landscape and not as isolated events.