Each of the stamp batteries in the Hi-Yu were equipped with mortar boxes made by the Joshua Hendy Iron Works of San Francisco. Within these cast iron boxes is where the heavy crushing occurred. As these stems were dropped the attached stamp heads would crush the ore that was fed into the mortar box using a unique pattern decided upon by the mill foreman. In the front of these boxes there originally would have been a perforated screen, which would have allowed the finely reduced ore to pass through and travel onto the attached apron table.​

The stamping floor is somewhat the tail-end of the ore dressing process - this is where the finely crushed ore is finally classified or sorted across apron tables. These apron tables would have been covered with a canvas sheet doused in mercury, and a series of small planks or cleats to help trap the heavier valuable material as it washed down the table.   

Growing up in the flatlands of Northeast Wisconsin, I have long been fascinated with big topography  and consistently drawn to maps - particularly those that use raised relief to depict elevation changes.

Raised relief maps are models of reality that present landscape formations in 3-Dimensions - allowing the user to both see and feel the  plains, valleys, and mountain ranges of the world. As a child, I remember being intrigued by the vast raised ridges that ran across the Americas -  one flowing from Alaska to New Mexico, and another running through Ecuador, Peru and Chile - places in which I would later work, travel, and live. These raised relief maps brought the dramatic geologic formations that occupy much of the western extent of the Americas to the classrooms of the topographically challenged Midwest. 

In my current office building at Michigan Technological University, a number of raised relief maps are conveniently hung in the hallway running next to the office microwave.  I've found myself casually perusing these historical maps when waiting for my lunch to heat up. What I've seen during these lunch-time inquiries is that these physical artifacts, also contain geographic artifacts left over from past cartography - and I'd be willing to guess, that I might be one of the first archaeologists to identify an intriguing artifact while waiting for their soup to cook in a Haier microwave.
​
But I digress. 

A primary objective of archaeological inquiry is looking for artifacts or cultural features that might signify past human activity on the landscape. Maps, like landscapes,  also contain artifacts,just not the physical tools that normally inspire archaeological investigation.  

The Carson Lake shown on this 1955 map is an artifact - in fact it hadn't existed for more than three decades. Once the largest body of water located within a 5 mile radius of the Mesabi Range's largest community, Hibbing, Carson Lake had been effectively removed from the landscape over a two-year period from 1917-1919. During this time, the Oliver Iron Mining Company, who had located iron ore underneath the lake years earlier, secured permits from the State of Minnesota to mine underneath the lakebed. ​

The cartographers from the Aero Service Corp. who designed the map of Wisconsin in 1955 weren't alone in their depiction of this phantom waterbody. Examining the 1951 USGS topographic map shown above, Carson Lake, and its namesake community (outlined in red) also appear.

​This inclusion inspires some questions: Is it possible that water might have re-entered the former lakebed over the 30-year period since the Carson Lake mine was closed, and this is what was captured on these maps? Or could it be a mapping oversight, where the cartographers were possibly relying on an older map to re-draw the area? 

Six years later, the 1951 TOPO map was revised, and in this iteration, the Carson Lake waterbody and community were removed (as a side note- by this time the community had been displaced by the newly opened  Carmi-Carson Lake open-pit mine). Cartographers revise maps in order to adjust for landscape changes, and to help capture the currentness of a specific space and place. When I started this post, I didn't foresee myself conducting a cursory examination of the process involved in topographic map revisions, but the historical processes used by the USGS is a truly interesting subject. According to this linked article by Larry Moore of the USGS, topographic maps underwent four main types of map revisions: minor, basic, complete and single edition.

From what I see on the 1957 revision, this map likely underwent a basic revision - meaning that USGS cartographers addressed known errors within the 1951 map, and then used geospatial materials available to them in 1957, such as aerial imagery, to attempt to make the revised landscape as accurate as possible.2  

Geographer Mark Monmonier has written extensively about the cultural decisions that go into maps - both in terms of the changing place names assigned to geographic features, as well as how these models of space and place reflect human agency, and can be used as tools to either promote or undermine certain landscapes.

While I do not think that there was any nefarious motive behind the depiction of Carson Lake on these maps - it shows how these models of reality can perpetuate geographic distortions, as well as how little we might actually know about the landscapes in which we live  or study.    

But what I find most intriguing about Carson Lake appearing on these maps decades after it was dewatered, mined, and eventually filled with mine waste - is thinking about how people in the past might have responded to seeing this feature on a map? What would have Mesabi Range residents, and particularly those living in Hibbing, thought if they had seen this phantom waterbody on the map? Might have it inspired a field trip to investigate this place, to see if by chance the lake had reappeared? 

Have you ever encountered a cartographic artifact, and if so, what was it?

​Post-mining landscapes often lie. What we see on the landscape today does not necessarily reflect the complex history in which that landscape was shaped. Instead, post-mining landscapes tell a story designed to convey a specific message to the public, often designed by either heritage organizations or reclamation agencies. In most post-mining landscapes, the story told by heritage organizations is often centered on either mining technology or architecture, seen in the focus on memorializing monuments representative of industrial capital. Consequently, the story that industrial heritage managers tell about post-mining landscapes often revolves around the interpretation of only a select few buildings and machines. However, these tangible manifestations make up only a small percentage of the post-mining landscape, while the overwhelming environmental impacts from mining are generally avoided. 

Likewise, reclamation agencies wish to convey a story that speaks of environmental cleanup, told through the recontouring and revegetating of waste piles, and the removal of derelict buildings. These reclamation efforts obscure many visible signs of mining, while presenting a landscape to the public that has been seemingly re-naturalized. Yet, reclamation often functions like a band-aid on a tumor, as immediate physical hazards are prioritized for remediation while the more widespread contamination is often left unaddressed. 
​In Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, the post-mining landscape tells a story of state-driven heritage strategies and reclamation efforts aimed at rebranding the range as a recreational rather than deindustrialized landscape. Located in Northern Minnesota, and extending for nearly 100-miles, the Mesabi Range was North America’s most productive iron range. From 1890 to today, more than 400 mines operated on the Mesabi Range removing over 3.8-billion tons of iron ore, the majority of which was extracted from highly efficient open-pit mining methods. Open-pit mining produces massive landscape transformations, evident in piles of mine waste along with deep surface chasms, impacts that persist long after a mine ceases production. During the late 1960s to 1970s, the Mesabi Range witnessed an increase in open-pit mine closure and abandonment, which accelerated the Range’s transformation from an active to a post-mining landscape, reflective of the economic, social, and environmental consequences of an industry based on a finite resource. 

​Beginning in the 1970s, state land managers and local communities began to grapple with how to reckon the landscape transformations that accompanied mine land closure and abandonment. Realizing that the Mesabi Range was entering a post-mining epoch, state personnel began to develop strategies to reimagine and rebrand the Mesabi as something more than a post-mining landscape, by promoting the Mesabi Range as a recreational destination cushioned with a rich and ongoing mining history. This process included the reclamation of the post-mining landscape, consisting of the revegetation of mine waste piles, and the removal of derelict buildings. Steps were also taken to bolster the Range’s heritage tourism economy, through the installation of a rails-to-trails system, and the marketing of active mine-viewing areas to promote the ongoing efforts of the iron mining industry. 

​In rebranding the Mesabi Range as a recreational landscape, the Minnesota DNR also made use of the abundance of new surface waters. As open-pit mines were closed and abandoned, the pumps used to dewater them were shut off, creating a veritable landscape of water. Today, there are 250 more lakes in the Mesabi Range than existed in 1890. Called pit-lakes, these waterbodies are the result of open-pit mining and abandonment, and represent a hydrological contrast from the dereliction that often defines a post-mining landscape. By the late 1970s, the Minnesota DNR began stocking these lakes with trout, hoping to lure Midwestern anglers to the region with this new renewable resource. Although this fish-stocking program has been met with much success, these pit-lakes are currently managed by the DNR as natural resources rather than historic mines, blurring their cultural significance. Yet, the stocking of trout into these abandoned mines has also functioned as an unintentional form of landscape conservation and an innovative approach to adaptive re-use.
​Today, visitors in the Mesabi Range can fish for trout in abandoned mines, as well as scuba dive in the former chasms of the Sparta and Gilbert mines, collectively known as Lake Ore-Be-Gone (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Garrsion Keillor’s Lake Wobegon). At Lake Ore-Be-Gone, scuba divers can explore a number of out of place artifacts, including a helicopter, a bus, a pirate skeleton, and a WWII era military plane – adding a layer of confusion for future archaeologists. Check out this video for a great look at what people encounter in this historic mine.

​Negotiating post-mining landscapes, like the Mesabi Range, present challenges for communities, land managers, and heritage organizations. Although mining may have ceased, communities within these landscapes often persist, as do the environmental legacies of extraction. It is the responsibility of heritage managers to articulate to communities and to the broader public not just the features on the landscape that they have selectively memorialized, but also the abundance of environmental impacts that may have become obscured by either reclamation or heritage efforts. Doing so provides a more honest interpretation of the post-mining landscape and helps ensure that future generations won’t forget how these landscapes came to be, or what latent mysteries they might still  contain. 

Further Reading:
Baeten, John, Nancy Langston, and Don Lafereniere, “A geospatial approach to uncovering the hidden waste footprint of Lake Superior’s Mesabi Iron Range,” The Extractive Industries and Society, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Nov. 2016) 1031-1045.
 
Baeten, John, “Contested Landscapes of Displacement: Oliver Iron and the Hibbing Mining District,” forthcoming in Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment (Fall, 2017).  
 
Goin, Peter, and Elizabeth Raymond, Changing Mines in America (Santa Fe: The Center for American Places, 2003).
 
Langston, Nancy, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
 
Manuel, Jeff, Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range, 1915-2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

​Svatos, Ray, “Fishing Minnesota’s Abandoned Iron Pits,” Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (July-August, 1986) 14-18. 

"What is the coolest artifact you have ever found?"  Countless archaeologists have been asked this question, and when directed at me it has always posed a challenge.  Was it a green obsidian spear point found in Northern California?  A stamp mill battery in Alaska? A chert awl in Arizona?
While I never have a quick answer to this question, what I do notice is that whatever my answer, the artifact is always something tangible, always something obviously human, and always rooted in technological materialism. I've been taught that an artifact is something mobile and something that was produced to serve some sort of purpose. Yet that is the orthodoxy of archaeology and heritage.  What happens when we begin to challenge this convention?

I was recently fortunate enough to visit some tremendous industrial heritage sites in Germany, the Landschaftspark in Duisburg, and  Zeche Zollverein in Essen. At both of these sites it is easy to become overwhelmed by their sheer grandeur, one centered around an enormous blast furnace works, the other centered around a towering coal mine shaft house. While I thoroughly enjoy these megaliths of industrial prosperity, what resonated with me most was a collection of artifacts housed in the Zeche Zollverein museum exhibit - appropriately called, "Environmental Destruction and Protection".

Tucked away in a corner of the museum's 3rd level, the "Environmental Destruction and Protection" display contains jars and soil core samples filled with soils contaminated by industrial processes, and florence flasks containing polluted waters.
I've long believed that mine waste constituted an artifact (although these are often called archaeological features - a semantic road we will not venture down in this blog post ), but I never really toyed with the idea of expanding the artifact categorization to include those less obvious products of human activity, things like contaminated soil and toxic water. 

But why not?  

​Contaminated soils and polluted waters are products of industrial capitalism - some of the human made residuals left over from industrialization - comparable to a waste rock pile at a mine or a flake scatter at an indigenous camp. These are all the leftovers from a concerted effort by humans to create. 

 So I ask:  
Can contamination or pollution = artifact(s)?  
and
What new understandings of contamination could arise from archaeological interpretation?

The National Archives has produced an artifact analysis worksheet, which serves as a useful guide for interpreting an artifact that you might find in the field or be tasked with analyzing in a lab.  
The questions on the worksheet follow the journalistic standard of knowing, asking: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How the artifact in question came to be.

But, more importantly the worksheet asks: "WHAT DOES THE ARTIFACT TELL US?" 
​
Explaining why an artifact matters to the public  is the key task for an archaeologist.

About a decade ago, I remember coming across a massive can scatter in the Lake Tahoe region. I measured these cans, took photographs, and compared them to a handy artifact guide to determine their age. What I learned was that this pile of rusty metal was dumped there in the 1940s. Some folks had set up a camp, possibly for logging or railroad maintenance, and this was what they left behind. The interpretive value of sites like these are low and tell us very little in the grand scheme of things: people  consumed goods here, and these same people were careless with their trash.  

Moral of the story, Don't Litter.  ​

Industrial heritage, broadly, is the study of capitalism - looking specifically at the products that were produced (and left behind) from industrial scale processes.

However, the primary focus of industrial heritage has been centered on two elements: the study and preservation of large industrial buildings and machines, and the promotion of historic industrial sites for tourism purposes. Both of these endeavors tend to celebrate nostalgia, and unintentionally promote the capitalist epistemologies that produced these places and things.

​Neither approach acknowledges the sheer abundance of environmental destruction wrought by industry. In fact, it can be argued that the most ubiquitous and important product created from industrial capitalism is its environmental legacy.  
So why not embrace contamination and pollution as meaningful artifacts of industry's past? What other stories might these pollutants tell us when interpreted not just through chemical analysis, but studied through an archaeological or sociotechnical lens?

To return to the National Archive's Question: "What does the artifact (contamination) tell us?"

I believe artifacts like  contaminated soils and polluted water hold a great deal of interpretive value - but more importantly I wonder what can archaeologists infer from these artifacts of industrial misuse, and how can this knowledge inform the public and policy makers who must interpret, manage, and live within these industrial landscapes? 

What do you think?

In the spring of 2012, I wrote a book review for IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology on the edited volume of conference proceedings: Post-Mining Landscape: Conference Documentation. The book is a collection of  reflections on managing, developing, and revitalizing massive industrial landscapes after the gears of industry cease to grind. The book is filled with impressive images of reimagined industrial landscapes - a swimming pool in the middle of former colliery coking plant, a cheese cellar in an underground copper mine, and the development of a greenbelt across slag heaps in Northern France. This truly innovative work resonated with me, and this past month I had the opportunity to visit a handful of sites in the North-Rhine Westphalia region of northern Germany. This post is a collection of photographs from one of the most impressive industrial sites I've visited - The Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord located just outside of Duisburg. While this post presents an overview of the in situ remains of the former iron smelting plant and blast furnaces, a future post will examine the transformation of the site from a post-industrial ruin into a vibrant cultural attraction - successfully melding history, nature, and industry into a model example of industrial reuse.      

The Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord was relatively easy to get to from the Duisburg Central Station - in fact the trams running from the station stop just outside the park. When inside there is a well equipped restaurant in the visitor center. You can easily spend upwards of 8 hours here exploring. 

Thanks for looking - and if you are interested in one of the larger file photos, just shoot me an email.

Abstract: "For decades, the Lake Superior Iron District produced a significant majority of the world’s iron used in steel production. Chief among these was the Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota, a vast deposit of hematite and magnetic taconite ores stretching for over 100 miles in length. Iron ore mining in the Mesabi Range involved three major phases: direct shipping ores (1893–1970s), washable ores (1907–1980s), and taconite (1947–current). Each phase of iron mining used different technologies to extract and process ore. Producing all of this iron yielded a vast landscape of mine waste. This paper uses a historical GIS to illuminate the spatial extent of mining across the Lake Superior Iron District, to locate where low-grade ore processing took place, and to identify how and where waste was produced. Our analysis shows that the technological shift to low-grade ore mining placed new demands on the environment, primarily around processing plants. Direct shipping ore mines produced less mine waste than low-grade ore mines, and this waste was confined to the immediate vicinity of mines themselves. Low-grade ore processing, in contrast, created more dispersed waste landscapes as tailings mobilized from the mines themselves into waterbodies and human communities."

I recently had the opportunity to write a blog post for NiCHE, The Network in Canadian History and Environment, as part of their "Seeds: New Research in Environmental History" series. In this post I summarize the construction of an Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) to help reveal the producers and content of historic mine waste, research described in fuller detail in a recent publication through The Extractive Industries and Society. 

You can read my post here, and make sure to explore some of the other great stuff happening at NiCHE here.