7 Home(less) Place and Home‐Making at the Albany Bulb

Russell City, California was once a small farming settlement located near San Francisco Bay. Its population increased and demographics changed during the 1940s, when African American and Latinx families migrated to the area and became the town's majority. The hamlet was never incorporated and lacked basic utilities, yet Russell Cityans self‐governed, provided civic safety services, established churches and businesses, and sealed financial deals between neighbors. In the 1950s, however, surrounding areas began considering Russell City a blight. Newspaper articles reinforced this idea, while simultaneously detailing governmental attempts to impede Russell City's improvement efforts. In 1963, Alameda County began the forced relocation of Russell's tenants via a redevelopment project. Residents protested to no avail, and by 1968 the town was destroyed. The area is now an industrial park.Contemporary archaeology methods like archival research, oral history, material analysis, photography, and mapping are essential to understand Russell City's past. Using these approaches also enables former residents to cognitively bridge past and present, contributes to forming individual identities, fortifies community solidarity, and exposes the paradox of how living in Russell City was experienced by townspeople compared to how it was viewed by those outside its perimeters. Lastly, documenting Russell Cityans’ experiences and mapping the town are acts that confront the race and class‐based systems that not only shaped their lives as well as others in similar communities across the United States, but continue to affect marginalized peoples today.

Section: Searching For External Supportsupporting

confidence: 80%

5 Reconstructing Russell City, California's Past: “The City May Be Gone, But the Memories Live On”

Wilkinson

2022

“…Complementing the memorywork revealed in the first four case studies, subsequent chapters in this volume illustrate how present-day and recent social interactions with old places and materiality encompass still-active systems of caretaking. Whether communities are intervening in the place of state infrastructure in New Jersey (Lorenc [2022] this volume, Chapter 8) or 'Akka (Taylor [2022] this volume, Chapter 9), or individuals are creating peaceful sites of respite in the San Francisco Bay Area (Danis [2022] this volume, Chapter 7), authors in this volume document how material objects and spaces reveal forms of care and support that are not easily appreciated-and in some cases are actively suppressed-by state or institutional authorities.…”

Section: Themes In the Contemporary Archaeology Of Old Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lorenc ([2022] this volume, Chapter 8) speaks to the failure of meritocracy in the United States, a startling realization that many Americans confronted as the economy crashed, leaving many economically successful people suddenly out of work and with no bootstraps (or social safety net) with which to pull themselves up. Echoing Danis's ([2022] this volume, Chapter 7) and Wilkinson's ([2022] this volume, Chapter 5) accounts of displacement and marginalization in the East Bay, millions of economically depressed individuals and families are fighting against the threat of eviction, while unhoused communities face new stigma and vulnerabilities associated with the threat of a deadly virus and local public health guidance that does not always attend to the needs and possibilities of those living outside.…”

Section: Themes In the Contemporary Archaeology Of Old Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Site formation, in addition to deep histories of spatial and material transformations, also incorporates contemporary land use and ecological processes, and, not to be forgotten, archaeological intervention. Each author in this volume extends archaeological analysis of an old place into the contemporary moment in order to reflect on evolving relationships between people and place and respond to contemporary issues with deep historical roots: urban planning and community dislocation and relocation (Chapters 5 [Wilkinson 2022] and 7 [Danis 2022]), contemporary manifestations of historical trauma (Chapter 4 [Two Bears 2022]), the afterlife of industrial toxicity (Chapter 6 [Stewart 2022]), meritocracy in heritage activism (Chapter 8 [Lorenc 2022]), place‐making at the margins (Chapters 2 [Sesma 2022] and 3 [Oliver and Cox 2022]), and community responses to gentrification and tourism development (Chapter 9 [Taylor 2022]). Authors demonstrate how the material traces of the past accompany, constrain, and open possibilities for people today.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

1 Exploring the Contemporary in Old Places

Taylor

Sesma

2022

This chapter opens an analytic space to consider the resonance of “old places” in the contemporary moment through the lens of archaeology. Borrowing the term used by some of our interlocutors, old places are places that bear memory, that have accrued emotional attachment, and that intervene in the present as reminders of things that have happened before. Through these qualities, old places sustain life and relations. We adopt an expansive view of site formation processes that extends into the present and future and argue that studying contemporary site formation can unleash insights into the multi‐temporal constitution of the world we inhabit. We do not insist on a single approach to studying these processes, but rather suggest that the methodological and theoretical diversity that archaeologists and local communities bring together is key to studying and knowing old places in the present. We draw connections between a contemporary archaeology of old places and the emergent fields of contemporary archaeology and critical heritage studies, but also argue for retaining and fully incorporating the political and activist orientations of historical, feminist, African Diaspora, and Indigenous archaeologies—fields that have long centered the knowledge and concerns of contemporary communities—into this work.

“…Far from being inert representations of the past—these materials are lively, political, and potent in the present. As the other wonderful contributors of this volume have noted (see Taylor and Sesma [2022] Chapter 1; Danis [2022] Chapter 7; Lorenc [2022] Chapter 8), this focus on the politics of material resonance shares compelling intersections with the archaeology of the contemporary; a project that wishes to mobilize archaeological methods and sensibilities to study the social processes of the recent past (Dawdy 2010; De León 2015; González‐Ruibal 2008). Here, I want to draw on the critical and reflexive insights from both projects to trace the toxic afterlives of industrial waste.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

6 The Ecological Life of Industrial Waste

Stewart

2022

The post‐depositional afterlife of an archaeological site is often viewed as the least important aspect of its history and outside of traditional archaeological interest. In the case of industrial sites, this elision ignores one of the most important aspects of industrial history, namely the long‐term effects of toxic waste. In an era where industrial pollution and anthropogenic climate change are rapidly changing the future of life on this planet, the stakes of understanding the effects of industrial waste are vital. This article outlines a reflexive, ecologically focused archaeology that interrogates the afterlives of industrial waste, not as a method to get back to the history of production, but as a means for taking seriously these afterlives as a defining characteristic of life in the Anthropocene. Using the concept of the ecological lives of industrial waste to explore the (post)industrial history of Mill Creek Ravine—a historically important industrial area in Edmonton, Alberta— this article argues that the decomposition of industrial waste serves as both a medium for long‐term harms, as well as the locus for emergent relations and critical investigation.