Introduction to Industrial Archaeolgy

While early communities in the American Colonies were first established to facilitate European trade under colonialism to Great Britain, other communities followed to more specifically concentrate labor and capital to extract and refine the extraordinary bounty of raw materials available in a new nation. The regions of northern New Jersey and more broadly of the northeastern Atlantic states offer a plentiful material record of this, our nation’s earliest period of industrialization. Not only was this nation-building period essential to the success of the Hamiltonian vision of a national economy based on industries, but it was also the beginning of the most intensive century of technological innovations, immigration and migration ever seen by people worldwide. The technologies that were deployed in the manufacture of goods and for the extraction of raw materials, and the very special places called “factories” that created and transformed the land, life and times of the communities that developed around them, is the focused study of Industrial Archaeology (IA). This talk will provide an introduction to this recently-adopted category of study within Historic Archaeology that got its start in the 1950s. A brief anecdotal background on archaeology as a 19th-Century emergent field will be given to provide context to IA, and examples of how IA has contributed to the record and understanding of this very important period of human culture will also be presented.

Bio: Gianfranco Archimede, MS, RPA, is an industrial archaeologist specialized in historic mining landscapes, their communities and the period of western expansion in the United States. After spending eight years working as an industrial archaeologist in various states in the West and Midwest, he returned to Paterson, NJ and has served for the past eighteen years as Director of the Division of Historic Preservation for the City of Paterson and Executive Director of Paterson’s Historic Preservation Commission. He provides programmatic guidance to the city on preservation planning and cultural resources, oversight of Paterson’s public preservation projects, and regulatory permitting review for hundreds of large and small scale construction projects within Paterson’s three national, state and local historic districts. He administers the Paterson HPC legacy programs for public awareness and education, which was honored in 2015 with a New Jersey Historic Preservation Award for Outstanding Achievement.

We're happy to announce that we'll be moving into a hybrid format. Now, you'll have the option of joining us virtually or in person at the Dey Mansion for each of our lectures. Whether in person or virtual, registration is still required and will provide further information on how to reserve a seat at the Dey Mansion.

Link: Introduction to Industrial Archaeology Tickets, Sat, Oct 1, 2022 at 1:00 PM | Eventbrite