 So it is now the power of plurality in counties, which I'm sure it's the same as a poster, emergence and boundary making in the 19th century industrial foreign glass. And as you know, he's a graduate student here in the anthropology program. And I'm assuming this is. Yeah, this is it. I don't know. I don't know. This is your dissertation. Good, it's done. This is me. This is me. This is your exit talk. What is that? And this is his exit talk. Thank you. And I appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who's here. I know we just got out of SAAs. Everyone's probably sick of hearing talks, so I know it probably took all of your being to be here. So I appreciate it. As Christine said, I'm going to be talking today on my dissertation work at the Samuel Adams Lightning Counts, which I located just outside of Santa Cruz, California. And I want to start my talk in the year 1904, which is actually towards the end of the Samuel Adams story as the operation closed in 1909. 1904, though, was the year that quick line production in volume peaked in Santa Cruz County. So in an economic sense, we could say that this was the height of the Santa Cruz line industry. But 1904 was also the years that the industry was rattled by the localization of working class labor. As a series of union-organized strikes were brought against the two major line companies that dominated the local industry. The Henry Cowell-Lieman's men company, the owner of the Samuel Adams operation at that time, being one of those two companies. And while labor organization had been gaining momentum in California throughout the late 19th century and early 20th century, these moments of collective action in the line industry marked a significant shift in relations of power in an industry that was long known for its diverse, transient, immigrant workforce and domineering industrial capitalist owners. The Samuel Adams Cuellens were one of a number of line operations that dotted the western foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, beginning around the 1850s. These Cuellens sites operated as company counts and were pluralistic sites. Places of encounter were diverse people immigrated from across the globe, lived and worked together and intimate in sustained waves, spending months together in close proximity, rotating through long shifts in work spaces, sharing meals in the company mess hall, and in many cases living together in small, one-room cabinets. In these intimate encounters of day-of-life, workers would have been forced to negotiate an alterity to work through differences and to work together to make a life in the industrial frontier. In doing so, workers would have built novel connections and relations in communities that cut across and reconfigured traditional boundaries of social difference. Despite this demographic diversity and variability of time, we know, as I've suggested, of immigrant laborers came together in 1904 in a series of union-organized strikes, and in those they demanded better wages, better housing practices, and a closed-shop firing system, which is basically where the companies are the higher union members. We also know that these unions were not organized along ethnic lines. As the story documents show that the line workers, coopers and teams for unions were ethnically diverse in membership. The situation then presents us with a challenging question. How did it come to a point where a highly diverse workforce of immigrant diverse could come together across these various meaningful axes of difference, things like ethnicity, language, occupation, and our class, and unite as a collective, organized, and mobilized labor community? I'm not the first person to ask this type of question. A number of historical archaeologists have explored how diverse groups work together in the industrial west. These scholars have investigated what they variously called inter-ethnic coalitions. They have explored how similarities in the life and labor trumps cut cultural differences within the community, creating the basis of a shared class consciousness. And they've described the multi-ethnic nature of class in the 19th and 20th century. And while these strengths are foundational in highlighting historical examples of worker community across diversity and the ways in which archaeological analysis can provide insights into these events, they all work from what I think are rigid and static understandings of ethnicity in class as distinct and separate identity categories linked through labor. In this way, workers are seen as overcoming their ethnic differences, willing to silo these aspects of their identity in the construction of unifying class consciousness. What I'm proposing is a slightly different take on that. Rather than seeing labor communities form a long-shared class experiences despite ethnic differences, I'm arguing that workers form novel labor communities precisely because of their cultural differences. It was diversity itself in the very process of negotiating these various differences in everyday encounters that resulted in new ways of doing in being. A blending, reconfiguring, re-entangling and hydrolyzing of social material practices that were co-constituted and shared, emerging from difference. In their communal production and shared enactment, these emerging practices work to create and forge all connections between workers that reshape community boundaries and relations. This would suggest, then, that unionization did not produce labor groups, as it's often suggested. Rather, unionization was itself a product of the formation and development of novel labor communities through the emergence of shared practices. So this approach to investigating pluralism and community formation is framed by new materialist theories. The ideas in vocabulary I've found particularly affected for moving beyond the dialectical limitations of post-colonial theories and especially productive for thinking about how materials are entangled in meaning and gallery-making. New materialism works from a central notion that materials are active and agensive, and that matter and meaning are not separate elements, but are inextricably fused together. In this way, all material bodies, human or non-human, emerge through interactions that we configure the material world. The concept of intra-action which is foundational to my approach comes from the work of Karen Barada. Whereas, inter-action pursues two fixed, predefined and independent bodies coming into a relationship. For example, the ways in which we've often talked about colonizer and colonized. Inter-action is concerned with the mutual constitution of entangled agencies where entities materialize in co-constitutive ways emerging through the relationship of interacting. In this way, material bodies, again, both human and non-human, are seen as an emergent phenomenon. Material assemblages that are products of ongoing intra-activity continuously taking shape through the dynamics of differentiation. So, emergency in this life recognizes that any phenomenon be it a ceramic plate, an edge-mode flat-sharp glass, or even a community identity are in a constant state of becoming through material discursive interactions. Emergence recognizes that history matters in the shaping of possibilities, but each interaction is co-constitutive if there is always the potential for creativity, for newness, for an awful emergence of something that is neither one nor the other, some greater than that's part of the QO. Differentiation, then, is not about othering or separating, but about boundary-making through reconfiguration, connection, and entanglement. Differentiation is about diffraction. If we're on towards, quote, diffraction is not merely about differences, and certainly not differences in an absolute sense, but about the nature of differences that matter. Diffraction is a material practice for making a difference, for topologically machine-figuring connections. New materialism, then, gives us the perspectives and vocabulary to attempt to talk about alterity through an examination of materials without slipping into dualisms, like self-hutter, human object, or nature and culture, and instead think about the ways in which particular phenomena, bodies, material objects, assemblages, and sites, but also social groups, identities, emerge through diffraction. Also relevant for this discussion is Anna Singh's notion of contaminated diversity. In this idea, she's recognizing that collaboration is a fundamental aspect of life, but collaboration means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Singh conceptualizes emergence as transformation through encounter. Recognizing that instability of social categories and boundaries, she argues that one must watch how things, categories, groups, and connections and collaborations emerge through encounter. Singh argues that quote, we must look for histories that develop through contamination to explore how a gathering became happening. Ideas that I found particularly effective for exploring the pluralistic social relations that I'm getting to. So a little context for what these ideas are useful for thinking about 19th-century industrial sites and the Santa Lab site in particular. The Santa Cruz line industry was a historical outcome of the California bullet rush and was one part of the rapid social, demographic, economic, technological and environmental change associated with that event in the social community. California went from 1848 being a remote fringe western outpost of the colonial Spain with a population of around 160,000, all except for about 1,000 being indigenous California peoples. Two by 1850 being a central node in a global economy with a population more than twice since 1848 number, almost all of that increased being non-native people. As a result of this particular historical development, many places, communities and industries in post-world rush California were extremely diverse from their origin. In these pluralistic spaces, day-to-day encounters and interactions were between many heterogeneous groups for communities. People came to these places already contaminated through the streets of encounter. The same line-fill operation was one of these post-world rush pluralistic spaces. Established in 1858 by 27-year-old Samuel Adams, an entrepreneur and businessman from New York, it started as an independent two-pot kiln complex that employed about 30 men. While the workforce was originally comprised entirely of laborers from the east coast of the United States of Canada, over the next 50 years until its closure in 1909, the same line-fill workforce and the wider line industry, like the broader city of California, would change considerably as subsequent waves of immigrants came to the Central Coast and founded employment and wage labor positions at the kiln operation. Of note in the history of this kiln site is the change of ownership that occurred in 1869. Facing a depression in the line industry, Samuel Adams sold his independent operation to the Davis and Cowell Company, which would later become the Henry Cowell Alliance Men Company. Henry Cowell was your prototypical 19th century industrial capitalist, and he ruthlessly acquired capital, labor, and power throughout the wider channel for his area in the late 19th century. He used cyclical depressions in the line industry to buy up independent operations, building a business along that by about the turn of the 20th century was a very year to having a monopoly on the global industry. How that affected workers' day-to-day lives is another aspect of my participation, but I'm not going to touch on that today. The transition of ownership to Cowell was associated with substantial changes to the Adams operation. Our archaeological work there allowed us to determine that shortly after Cowell's ownership, the operation expanded to the already existing two-pot operation that also included a former residence and a share of workers' cabin. The Cowell expansion around 1870 also included reconstruction and additional kiln pot, making it a three-pot operation, as well as the construction of an additional workers' cabin to house the presumably larger workforce associated with that additional kiln, and the addition of a bourbon's office, cold storage room and expansions for additions to the cookhouse and the mess hall. So the change in ownership and operation expansion also coincided with shifts in the demography of the workforce. We can track these changes through census and other historic documents to see that over time Cowell pulled considerably from successive ways of immigrants. By the turn of the 20th century, this employment strategy resulted in a workforce at the same level of operation that was comprised of Irish immigrants who worked in managerial positions as operation foremen, and they oversaw a workforce of manual laborers at four years, the line earners and the teamsters who were comprised of some Irish workers but predominantly made up of Portuguese immigrants, mostly from the Azoran Islands, and Italian immigrants from the Swiss Italian border. From at least 1870 until the operation closure in 1909, there was also always a single Chinese immigrant employed as the company cook for the Sandalabes operation, although that specific individual changes over time. So before I get into the material examples and evidence that I'm going to talk about, and since the backdrop of this conversation is a little bit weird, it's appropriate to give credit and thanks to the really awesome team of undergraduate students that worked in both the field and the lab with me on this project. So my distribution field work was organized as a field school, at our largest we had 13 students in the field and six in the lab, four different institutions were represented, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, St. Marius College, and West Valley College. Special thanks go out to Nick Perez and Chandler Fitzsimons, which I'm sure are graduates from here, they were just field staff who served as my eyes and ears when we had multiple units open. Big thanks go out to Sharon Hogan who I think is here for every semester in the lab that we had work going on and she really took ownership over the flotation aspect of the work among many other things, it was a huge help. Also a DTE Ragnar who I hope is here as well. Also in the lab for multiple semesters did many things but it was really helpful on helping me with the funnel analysis as well. Priyanka Amitpatel wrote an undergraduate thesis that looked at the unionization in the line ministry. Rebecca Geiger also did an undergraduate thesis. She also volunteered her truck as a second field vehicle and after a week of my cooking she quickly took over the field camp cooking logistics and not so little things that really make a great field project. But every undergrad was extremely helpful. I was really lucky to have such a great team and extremely indebted to them. It's really one of the impossible without their help and it's been great to see a number, actually a majority of them have gone on to either grad programs in archaeology or professional work in archaeology. So it's been great to see. So just a little background on our field work to give you a bit of a necessary context for discussion. Our field was conducted in the early 2000s. We were looking up to get data, information and the collections themselves from that work. So it served as a great pilot study that clarified things like future boundaries and stratigraphic relationships. And the previous work really allowed us to identify likely data-rich intact deposits to give us a glimpse and hints as in the types of materials we might find in different areas, what the function of these different spaces might have been related to unexplored areas that we might want to investigate and this really allowed us to isolate areas that were going to be productive for our particular research questions and goals. It allowed us to deploy a minimal amount of excavation units to recover our required data set to allow us to keep invasive disturbance to a minimum. And yes, we can find a whole kiln board that was fun. Excavations were undertaken at various locations. Excavations were undertaken at various locations across the Samuel Adams landfill site, which is on what is today Wilder Ranch State Park, which is located just west of the city of San Cruz. Excavations were undertaken on what was determined to be residential or domestic spaces including both of the shared workers cabinets, also the foreman's private residents, also at the work spaces that included the foreman's office, the lime kilns themselves, those red belts were back for units, the coop bridge, the cookhouse and the colt storage room and the central communal gathering space, which would have been the company mess hall. And here that is on the actual terrain which we're going to be able to look like out there. We excavated by natural transport and we took location samples from each level and resulted in a fairly high resolution data set that captured a broad range of materials with about 22,000 artifacts from our work. So I'll turn to a discussion of some of the materials that I think that we found that I think provide interesting lines of evidence in support of the argument that I'm making about workforce diversity and resulting in intercultural counter has led to the production of novel labor communities. So the first example I'd like to look at edge modified glass remains, which will recover in significant quantities from across the site. While often recovered at contact period sites and used as evidence for the persistence of indigenous lithic technologies into the colonial period, their presence at late 19th century industrial sites is much less common. We recovered 541 edge used or lightly untouched glass plates from across the site. In addition to 823 production flicks or indicating that glass napping activities did in fact take place at the site and these objects were coming in already formed. Overall these glass plates are generally asymmetric, inconsistent in size and shape and generally clearly formed, suggesting they were created and used as expedient tools to address likely daily and routine cuttings, criticating and shaming needs. The question that arises however is why at the late 19th century industrial site with no known Native American presence and where that could presumably come in place is their significant evidence for the creation of these glass cutting implements. What I think what's going on here is that glass modification was one response by workers to issues of access in the industrial town. While we recovered a fairly substantial amount of these modified glass artifacts we recovered a conspicuously small amount of metal knives or other formal metal cutting tools like razors, which often show up on industrial sites. The reason for this possibility is that in the broader environment of increased attention, company managers may have control or limited access to materials that could have been used as potential weapons and non-violent labor resistance. Or more simply perhaps metal cutting and shaving tools were simply a cost prohibitive or otherwise inaccessible for these industrial wage workers and they were simply not a part of their material consumption and use patterns. The modified glass remains therefore could be evidence of resourcefulness and drift on the part of industrial wage workers and figuring a way to meet their needs despite an economic inability to purchase the formal metal tools or structural limits to their access and use. Whatever the case this last time the activity may have been a response a creative negotiation of various barriers to access that allow workers to meet their cutting in by capturing their own implements. Mark Walker, who is a historical ideologist who works here in California in his discussion of the material culture and cases of transient working class labor in the 19th century identifies a preference for portable expedient material culture. He focused primarily on modified metal cans as a creative response to the realities of transient life. But I think the same logic could be extended to modified bottle glass rather than investing in expensive and heavy metal cutting tools the practices of glass kidnapping may have emerged as a shared skill with the most transient wage laborers in the American West. Edge modified glass artifacts were found across the site but they were found in the greatest quantities that part over there at the company mess hall again the communal gathering and social center for the workers in the area of most direct social interaction negotiation. It's easy to imagine I think sitting imagine the workers sitting at the mess hall benches casually gnawing glass sharing those techniques the materials and the finished edges as they also share the drink or smoke and stories from the day and use those glass plates to touch up the wooden handles on something like that. The recovery of these artifacts across multiple spaces and again the highest quantities in the shared communal space suggest they were not confined to one ethnic group or one labor occupation. It appears to have been an emergent practice, a unique but collective response to the particulars of life in these lime kilns. And that in its shared enactment were to connect with the diverse population of lime makers. The materiality of lime making is also good I think for thinking about in a new materialist way the boundaries of material bodies are blur emergent and transformative and interaction. Quickline again as limestone or calcium carbonate through firing and kill calcium dioxide is expelled creating quickline of calcium oxide a lighter and more malleable powder material conducive to trade and transportation by adding water or slaking the quickline one creates lime pudding calcium hydroxide a material that can be manipulated into any number of shapes and forms and used for a wide range of purposes mostly construction. When let to cure that lime pudding absorbs carbon dioxide transforming chemically back into limestone. So in this way through various social material entanglements and eventual reconfigurations the matter of lime comes to matter in new ways. And these entanglements are not just about humans acting on lime the lime acted agentively on the laborers as well it was a nature of action a co-constitution of material bodies workers bodies seemingly diverse in ethnicity class and occupation would have been reshaped in a community of labor factors who shared bodily interactions with lime and quickline normally with the workers hands become calloused in muscle and muscles tone through the hard work of manual labor the bodily markers of the working class but blind workers would have shared particular bodily materialities their skin covered in a layer of white powder, air matted with sweat and dust lungs burning from the noxious air skin eyes teal with a caustic burn as workers shared workspaces, residences and meals they would have also shared coughs, burns, aches and illnesses like pneumoconoices and occupational respiratory disease which is produced by inhaling dust the laborers bodies were transformed through the lime work emerging through repeated interactions with mineral bodies in variously shifting forms, producing bodily materialities that were shared across occupational ethnic and class lines. They shared bodily experiences and materializations would have worked to create a community of lime workers in physical bodies, conditions and experiences and it's not that these masked other aspects of differentiation but they would have become entangled in the complex formation of community buildings within this pluralistic industrial site inviting labor practices also extend beyond the purportive in 19th century industrial sites tools, clothing, personal items and objects of employment would have worked with, beyond or against the body in complex ways to create the various categories that they indexed continuously creating meaning through their active embodiment. Clothing items were covered show a high degree of similarity across manual labor spaces with the assemblage being dominated not that surprisingly by work order elements. Recovered seamlessly by boss buttons and rivets, many of them still having denim attached which was kind of cool we found buttons from other common work order companies like boss of the road and camp boston we also found sturdy leather work boots up here, over there and crosser buttons from workshoes, shirts, gator buttons and work wear jacket buttons the similarity of material culture is likely a part of the function as the nature of lime work necessitates material and protective clothing but that's kind of the point in labor in the formation of a particular community of practice the workers regardless of ethnicity language or specific occupation took on similar material trappings of bodily adornment new materialist orientations necessitate to think about these materials not as passive markers but also as active in their own right and these buttons, clothes and other highly visible features circulate as components of bodily assemblages and it would become entangled in the negotiation of boundary making and community making in their single area they were in order to build connections and relations across the traditional boundaries of difference reconfiguring differences that matter and working to build the community of lime laborers things get a little different when we look at the material coming from the word in domestic spaces associated with the form and operation which again in 1865 1909 the manual laborer although it changed over the years was always an Irish environment who had previously been employed as a manual laborer in the industry and had worked his way up to the position of foreman so materials recovered reflect this kind of middling position, it's the liminal occupation recovered many materials that were similar to those associated with manual labor we found key periods and work shirt buttons as well as alcohol bottles and tobacco types but there were also interesting material examples that differed from their material and worker assemblage in important ways from the foreman's office we recovered things like loan collar studs which would have taken the place of fixed crosser buttons on the work shirts and cut shell bone and even gold weighted jacket buttons which would have stood out in comparison to the typical cast iron worker jacket button these objects I think were strategically ambiguous, they would have been both familiar and different from the view button manual workers in daily encounters with the foreman these bodily materials I think are evidence of strategic practices of boundary making that purposefully created ambiguities that allow the foreman's situational flexibility the overpass is both one of the guys one of the workers but then also as the boss who was in charge depending on the particularity of the social situation the same materials could work to build both cohesion and connection to the workers in their similarities in other situations they could embody the foreman's authority power and status in their distinctions in this way the materials provided the capacity to slip into various communities or subject positions one would have been most advantageous highlighting the fluid, emerging and situational nature of the community at pluralistic sites so similarity in material culture was not limited to the clothing materials the majority of ceramics were almost all durable plain, whiteware and ironstone vessels and they would have been provided by the company produced by the worker by the community at the cameo company mess hall so the plain sturdy mismatched ceramics provided by the company may have meant to strip the workers of any potential unifying aesthetic sparkling vessel for an austere industrial existence perhaps but out of the seemingly undifferentiated collection the plainness itself may have come at becoming a more identifying feature this is an idea put forward by Margaret Wood who makes this argument in contrast to the heavy decorated T-wears used in socially competitive contexts of the T-rituals that were popular amongst Gen T-ville middle and upper class Victorians where ordinate ceramic forms and decorations were actively used to manipulate one's distinctions and social differentiation in contrast Wood already knew that the plainness of the ceramics found in working class context quote do not represent difference in competition rather than similarity in commonality in essence Wood in essence Wood is arguing that the materiality of undecoratedness afforded a sense of cohesion among workers and undifferentiatedness if you will that worked to reinforce and actively create connections in commonalities within the diverse workforce and while the forms and lack of decorative patterns is pretty common for ceramics from industrial sites the origin of these vessels was a little bit surprising interestingly all of the recovered marks that we found in our excavations were all from British ceramic companies out of the 61 fragments with marks not a single one was from an American parter a small amount of hotel work were recovered and that was a common American produced ceramic so those might be the American made but they only represented 2.5% of the total ceramic assemblies so the pattern is a little bit puzzling because during the latter part of the 19th century at the same time that the American ceramic industry is growing and tariffs were making British ceramic more expensive and relatively less accessible we see that the same amount of owners continue to purchase almost only British made stuff and specifically Staffordshire produced vessels so this pattern I think might be explained by the broader context of global labor relations essentially in the mid 19th century British manufacturers especially those centered in Staffordshire County were able to gain a lot of football in the growing post value American pottery market by embracing industrial manufacturing practices and anti-uniting activities that allowed them to keep costs low through the increased economies of scale the low cost ceramics provided by Staffordshire companies again afforded partly through these anti labor practices created challenges for American ceramic producers North American potters were forced to drop their prices and reduce laborers wages to remain profitable labor in the American pottery industry responded with greater activity and active resistance to a much greater degree than that seemingly so while it's possible that the same labs company shows to purchase only British ceramics as a purely practical or economic decision the wider labor context suggests this consumer choice may have also been purposeful and strategic the purchase of only British made ceramics and the avoidance of American made ceramics which were again comparably priced and equally not more available but were enjoyable in these more visible labor disputes and unrest may have been one way in which the lime companies anti-labor positions were made manifest of material discursive declaration of allegiance for capitalist owners of the laborers likewise the small number of miscached hotel wares that we did recover made the evidence of strategic supplementation by the line workers an adjunct to practice employed by the line workers to subtly align themselves with and support wider working class labor organization in collective action using a personally acquired American made ceramic in the context of ubiquitous British made company supplied vessels in a communal space like the mess hall may have been yet another form of practical politics a socially weighted activity that can be seen interpreted and understood by other manual laborers and in its shared enactment this practice could have built served to build connections, entanglements and community amongst the workers in subtle ways that were less visible to company owners and over resistance so for my last material example I want to discuss I want to look at what I personally find as the most interesting and evocative material example of emerging practices at the San Francisco the artifacts in question are a small assemblage of peck marked ceramic vessels recovered from the cookhouse and mess hall the practice of peck marked vessels is a Chinese tradition that continues to today and remember that from at least 1870 until it's closure of 1909 there was always one Chinese immigrant employed as the cook at the site and we recovered a substantial amount of Chinese made and traditionally Chinese associated materials from across the site in multiple spaces beyond just the cookhouse some of those things were liquor bottles a glazed stoneware liquor bottles fragments of pickle and soy sauce jars cobbian pipes rice bowls and medicine bottles the practice of peck marked the practice of peck marked involves a short implement to remove small dots of glaze in a patterned way to create a symbol or design peck marked vessels have long been recognized as a fairly common feature of archeological sites in California with the Chinese to ask for presence but they are rarely investigated beyond description and translation in all cases in which peck marked vessels have been recovered archeologically at least in the ones I've been able to find in the literature peck marks are used to construct Chinese characters in every case the purpose of these marks is debated it's likely that they meant and did different things in different contexts while traditionally used as a way to foster good luck and health in the crowded boarding houses and boat camps of the American West they may have also served as a partnership and identification interestingly the marks we found at the sandalabra site are not Chinese characters at all they are words written in Latin script or Latin letters the peck word in these two cases is the word chow c-h-o-w while chow could be a name nothing closer to that turns up in census documents or other historic records chow however was also a common slang word for mixed food in the mid to late 19th century a slang word that came about directly through Chinese and European encounters in 19th century world industrial work camps of the American West the slang word chow is derived from chow chok sui a uniquely Chinese American class of stir fry dishes in the late 19th century stir frying was a foreign cooking technique for most Euro-Americans and it defied translation as English words did not yet exist to describe the stir frying method and as a result the word chow emerged as the Chinese opinion word for stir fry food the entangled nature of these assemblage objects becomes apparent in attempts to describe that in these objects we have a opinion word chow written in Latin letters in cursive script using a traditional Chinese ceramic peck marking practice on British made ceramics found at the American work camp at least one of the British ceramics was part of the producer's line of Chinese shaped ceramics designed intentionally to index Chinese ex-work force elements themselves linked to the global networks of trailing taste, aesthetics and status these artifacts are difficult to classify as they defy essentialization it becomes impossible to identify what parts are Chinese, what parts are European even who was doing inscribing and who was doing the viewing this unclassified nature this ambiguny, this e-territorializing quality is the important feature however these artifacts are neither Chinese nor European nor simply a combination of both they are something entirely new an ambiguous material reconfiguration emerging from sustained social entanglements in the California industrial far west we do need to also think about these entanglements beyond the boundaries of this archaeological site both the Chinese Koch and the European immigrant laborers were operating within an already existing history of cultural interaction they did not come together at the same allowed site as fixed or pure entities of Chineseness or Portugueseness archaeological examinations of Chinese immigrants often began with their landing in the United States, forgetting that the Guangzhou region of China where most of the immigrants were coming from had had contact with the European traders as early as the 1500s the establishment of European trading ports in Macau and Hong Kong led to a long history of interactions and mutual influences in the area to use Anna Sting's words again the Chinese, Portuguese and others immigrating to California in the 19th century were already contaminated by a history of diversity and brilliant local interaction so when at the San Orlando site in the 1880s or so a Chinese Koch was preparing a Euro-American meal for a Portuguese laborer that encountered though it may have been a novel for those individuals would have been entangled in long genealogies or cartographies of social material of interaction these interactions of the land kill men are a continued and imminent unfolding materialities of an emerging and global industrial world in the 19th century critically these examples show that the blending and learning practices are not restricted to the realm of language the pet marks are not just words they're not only symbols they're not simply representations the act of assembling these objects but also the inter-matter their circulation and use works to link meaning, practice and material in newly created ways that go beyond language and words with the act of pecking the word becomes inseparable from the material object in its materialization it is nearly its materialization that the word chow matters maintains a capacity to act to affect the social world in which it's a part and to facilitate the emergence and new meanings the pet mark assemblage is not limited however to those chow marks there is another artifact an iron stone from the cookhouse that exhibits evidence of a more crude or non-pattern pet mark here we have what appears to be an attempt to pet mark a vessel but as Gina Michaels notes she's one of the few people that's actually looked at pet marks she says the creation of a pet mark on a porcelain bowl or plate is not a quick and easy task to apply a hard object with enough force to chip away at its surface but not so much as to crack the bowl vessel there seems to be something of an art to create clean legible characters so what I think this crude pecking may be reflecting is the learning process whereby someone was developing, practicing or playing sorts of pet marking skills so perhaps a rare example of encounter and experimentation and many archeologists have explored ways in which situated learning and the sharing of practices through doing are inherently social activities that frame understandings of individual and group identity and affiliation i.e. they frame community boundaries the evidence for the sharing of this traditional Chinese practice the experimentation and the learning the creation of hybrid phenomena all these serve I think as evidence for material discursive interaction in the making of communities of practice amidst diversity all of this is not to say that life and pluralistic industrial townsites would have always been convivial we know that there was conflicts fights, tensions and struggles amongst the workers often along at making class lines and it would be naive to assume negotiations of difference were always peaceful or productive but collaboration and community making may not be harmonious in fact the contention here is that it's the very negotiation of alterity and conflict that serve to connect people together as a community of industrial laborers in interesting and important ways so in summary I've attempted to show that the particularities of life at the Sano-Adams Line Cells afforded novel encounters the reconfiguration of boundaries of difference in the emergence of novel communities of practice industrial sites therefore were places of creativity, connection and community making as much as they were landscapes of control and exploitation it's not simply that a shared class experience united ethnically diverse workers a bounded and fixed understanding in class did not simply overcome a bounded and fixed understanding of ethnicity in the creation of organized labor more am I arguing that the ethnically diverse workers created a new homogeneous and harmonious culture this is not a call to return to a melting pot model of change it's not about assimilation or the whole heart of abandonment it's about ongoing development and change it's about the ways in which the emergent co-creation of material practices also works to co-create communities so the title of my talk is a play on the title of the text by Sarah Coway in which she eloquently outlines the plurality of power at work at 19th century industrial operations and in that she highlights different ways in which power was made manifest by workers and owners in various forms of material in an individual environment but I think the materials that we've recovered at the single album site highlight the power of plurality early industrial sites were places of struggle and conflict and as such they were places of encounter and a new meaning of negotiation and change experiencing and actively participating in these negotiations of difference I argue would have worked towards the communal co-creation of new ways of doing and being and in doing so the co-creation would have been reconfigured reimagined and remade and novel communities of practice would have emerged communities that afforded later union formation and the possibilities that a diverse workforce could unite and organize resistance to exploitative company policies so I think that's where all that things up thank you all for your time before I answer any questions at all I definitely want to say thanks again who's not here but she's off getting an award in New York also to Kent Whitefoot and David Engin from the History Department thanks to State Parks for allowing us to do this work really we're helpful in facilitating all of this happening and especially to use some of the funding sources the Stalem O'Reolson and then also the Jack Kinnan Graduate Fellowship in Labor Culture and History so I'm happy to answer any questions but thank you yeah how is it in the laundry department why are you trying to manage that kind of thing are you going to be here good question actually from very early on there was a large degree of what's called vertical integration with the new time industry so most of these operations that companies that own these various operations also employ their own team scripts they use oxen lines or if they were at the San Aladdin site is upon a pretty established creek now called Longer Creek so they would float the process line down the creek where they would all mount an oxen train and if the companies owned their own scooters the scooters would take the barrels of the wine to the closest port of San Francisco up here in North California and they would trade it out to San Francisco I actually believe that when you assume that the San Francisco capture potter is arriving and crying out in a cow or how come I wasn't assuming that it's possible but it probably would have come through its own type of exchange networks that import to the East Coast and drop to the West Coast mostly the big hits came that way all the way around the big vessels although I'm sure there is the possibility that some trickle through specific trade know what's going on Thank you that was really cool and for obvious reasons I'm really seeing the Tecmark vessels People may have been hearing me talk about that I'm curious about the photographs that you show of the workers themselves in the Chinese railroad context there have been some studies of the way that the workers appear or don't appear in photographs depending on whether they are changed or not and I was curious if you've been able to identify any individuals by name in photos and if there are any patterns to when or why the photos are taken I don't know if there are patterns as to when and why I have been able to not identify individuals I don't know which ones are which as is the case with many immigrant workers who bounce around a lot they're hard to track down also, especially with the Portuguese a lot of them have the same name most of them are scrapping onto the historical records it's kind of challenging so some of the photos I showed were likely, I don't know I think they were part of efforts by newspapers on the local line industry some of the really good descriptions of what we get are some of the best descriptions of what these sites were like historically, how they changed over time are from these kind of articles where the court goes to the line and describes what they see so I have a feeling some of these photos are associated with that although I don't want to throw those newspaper articles that I found most of those photos come from the Santa Cruz National History Museum and the local history museum and the libraries that are happening by the historical department as well as UC Santa Cruz as a whole archive on Cal specifically so I was able to get some interesting maps and company documents that I go into in greater detail in the visitation regarding the Chinese laborers not being able to show up in any of the photos and I found this in a lot of sites I haven't found photos of them in a line from how I get to see a distributed photograph we know that they're there from references and historic documents and then like seven census documents and things like that so I find that interesting in that we don't know who's taking the photograph why it's being taken and why that might apply to the exclusion of Chinese laborers but from a material culture standpoint I think there are evidence of collaborations and inter-ethnic traditions and things like that for purposes of the time I didn't go into detail but we find these Chinese made stuff all over the site so we're pretty sure that the Chinese Coke lived in a room attached to the cook house but we find soy sauce bottles and pickled jars Chinese brown-blade stoneware vessels in the workers house even in the formulas private residences and things like that which would suggest there's some sort of sharing of materials and pastes all sorts of things thank you cool man I've got two questions one's really focused on what's happened the first one is second one is so we've been working for a long time right? how is what you were talking about the kill works at water relate to the kinds of stories that have been spinning about these places the stories that we have about Santa Cruz's I think it may be in different directions but I'd like to hear from you how you see the area changing about these places um yeah so yeah the final assemblage which really didn't get into too much detail even in the dissertation it didn't end up being the focus domain focus data set that we explored things in but we found not surprisingly again sort of this process of vertical integration cowl also owned huge huge herds of cattle he lived not far from this operation less than two miles away on cowl ranch which was a full company town and his son was actually owned really into agriculture and cow raising things like that so not surprisingly we see most of the food coming out are domestic kids interestingly it's a lot of the same elements suggesting I think they're probably butchering them at cowl ranch and then bringing components to Samuel Adams again only a couple miles away we found some interesting historical discussions where they basically said we would have like big parts of the animal or in some cases whole cows or whole animals and the Chinese they were talking about at the cowl site so it might have been a little bit different than Samuel Adams but the Chinese cook would just kind of go ahead and cut off what he needed every day and cook that out and so we see interesting in the butcher patterns we see many mixes of handsaw kind of where it approaches the bushrine but then also clear marks and things like that on the same elements so we can kind of see the ways in which maybe they would be broken down by a American laborer at cowl's ranch brought out to the Samuel Adams and then further broken down by the Chinese cook so there is some cool stuff like that and we see interesting examples of supplementation so there's a lot of wild rabbit and birds and some fish and mussels so all things that can kind of be trapped while you're tending to the hills or like easily acquired at the coast which is only about a mile and a half away and so yeah there's some interesting there's other conversations behind about supplementation as a way if not active resistance the way in which it's entangled in can be making practices yeah and then your other question kind of you know I think it's a story about Andy, Sara and Cowell yeah so I don't know if this is where you're being too but Cowell is kind of weird in Santa Cruz there's parks and streets and a lot of the things you read in the literature that's written in like the 20s and 30s and 40s Cowell was not like these other industrialists and he hated them well and like the line workers were paid to live in ways they weren't paid extremely well many of the striking much of the strikes were about increases in wages and things like that and what we found archeologically suggests that there was very little investment in worker well-being most of the construction activities date to the early 1850s right after Caltech ownership and then we see almost no evidence of upheaval, cooperation anything like that even the Ceremonica sandwich this was an operation from 1909 most of our ceramics date the oldest they are is 1890 so like these guys are eating all that stuff it was probably chipped and worn down and a lot of that I think led to some of the a lot of that I think people taking that stuff led to formal unification activities and things like that so yeah I am kind of alone in being critical of Caltech but I haven't been talking about that so they have a great talk great presentation so I was always wondering because I visited out there were all the workers living up there all these single members did they because one of the things I always wondered about are they part of larger households how is that configured because I think that has a lot to do with interaction that's a really good question and it's been really hard to kind of tease that out the workers' cabins were burned down in the I think the 50s or 60s as part of management activities before State Parks so it's one of the really good feel for how big the workers' cabins were the first half my based on what we could identify in that thought and what we actually did was it wouldn't have been the two workers down there would not have been big enough to house even the 30 person workforce which was what it was in that one it was just two pots what long ago was probably 50 or 60 over the years and we are fairly close can bring up that other map I think it's likely that workers came out for shifts or cycles or possibly even daily I was able to track the foreman from the late 1880s and through the 90s he actually lived on Cowell Ranch and he would come out in the census documents he was living on Cowell Ranch so it's unclear whether his family lived there and who lived at the line come on or something like that so what I think actually is the case is that these shared cabins were actually I think they were found by the plot houses because it was 24 hours where these people were in 24 hours a day and had to be tended to 24 hours a day the guys worked 11 hour shifts and so I think it was basically you know you have these beds pretty limited you know which beds in the cabins and you know Paul Groth has written about this and sort of like how you could literally just rent a bed and it was always warm because you came in as the next guy was leaving and I think that's kind of what was going on here and that's what and we see evidence of this kind of like we've seen a niggling on the cabins but a lot of the social activity and a lot of interesting stuff is coming from the nest lot I think we guys are pretty much just sleeping at the cabins but only interesting interactions the sharing the stuff is going on at the nest all it would have been like it would have functioned as the neighborhood somewhere or the corridor at the social guide and so yeah two different amendments if you are about to just hear if you're ready to go one is to go back to something that was written a number a year ago and he had a whole theory about the structure of common difference and I can give you he published one version of it in the General Social Archaeology early on and then probably go about Jane Bennett I think what she does in her book, Vibrant Man really takes some of the material things and pushes them much more politically and I think she doesn't have as much of what you told us today as much of the political ramification that you could push well I am familiar with Jane Bennett's work and I do discuss her her takes in the actual dissertation I'm not as overtly political or maybe not as overtly political but I hope what comes out of this resonates in especially contemporary conversations where these divisions between us and them are being manipulated and being reinforced and these ideas of who is part of the community and not are highly relevant so I hope that the conversation aren't political just in having them but yeah I did lay out some of the legal political nature of dynamics yeah but it's there okay I'm not an archeologist but in the 50s as a child I explored the fall creek on site with my dad I can vividly remember all the structures and of course the fields and I'm curious to know if any work has been done at that site and where are we finding any further information about it I don't know I don't think there's been any work done at that site there has been a little is that yeah I don't think there's been only one more project so there's been a small project done at the Cowell Ranch killings which is basically where UC Santa Cruz is today and there's been one at the IXL killings how one year felt in is that the fall creek I think that is so I think that is that one of the cultural resource management projects so it kind of exists in a great literature that I've been able to track down but it's not widely accessible so I can happily try to get you a copy of that if you're interested in it so can I reach you through your website there I can give you my email great thanks everybody