Timothy Scarlett's Research Page

Michigan Tech Department of Social Sciences

General Research Interests

Can I get involved with archaeological research at MTU?

Utah Pottery Project

West Point Foundry Project

Industrial Landscapes

Alaskan Dredge Mining

Fallasburg Mill Assessment

Carp River Forge

Lancaster Brick Works

CTY Archaeology: Archaeology and Young Students

Contact Details

Links

Dr. Scarlett's Research Page

Here's a couple of thumbnail views of some research projects...

Generally speaking...

I'm interested in diverse topics! As an archaeologist and an anthropologist, I've explored a number of different ways of looking at the present and the past. I've worked on sites produced by people that range from ancient North and Central America to the 20th Century United States. My passions always focused me on the sites that connect with the formation of the modern world- the world we all currently know. I will not tie myself to a particular theoretical perspective in archaeology, because so many interesting, important, and compelling questions exist. Theories are tools and doing different jobs well requires efficient, custom-designed tools.

Petrographic Thin Section of Eighteenth Century Redware Ceramic sample from Massachusetts.

Crystalline Concentration Feature in a spectrographic thin section from a redware ceramic sherd, New England, Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century.

Utah Pottery Project

I've researched Utah's Nineteenth-Century immigrant pottery makers since about 1995. I started learning the basic questions: who, when, where, and what. I built upon major works, particularly those by Kirk Henrichsen (1988) and Emma Nielsen (1963). The entire catalog of potters now includes nearly 100 master potters, clayworkers, factory owners, family members, and apprentices that worked in the Great Basin region of North America. The potters worked at more than forty five shops in twenty six towns centered in Utah's Mormon Domain. The industry spanned from Logan to St. George, Panguitch to Vernal, and out of state into Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada. Workers made flower and tea pots, preserve jars and umbrella stands, piggy banks and chimney flue liners.

I've been studying the sociotechnical system they built surrounding their work, telling the entire story that connects the mundane to the cosmological. Each potter did not just produce crockery. They also produced the social status for their products and themselves, helping to build a society in the desert. This ethnogenesis, as some have called it, provided the potters the opportunity to link their faith and their profession. I've also statistically analyzed waster fragments from many potteries using Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA, and also LA-ICP-MS). Each potter's ware looks chemically different from their neighbors, even those who lived in the same valley or city! I now expect to start studying how people traded and exchanged each potters' ware, testing the role of religious tithe, peddling, marketing, and developing transportation in the business of potting.

I'm also raising research funds to complete more intensive archaeological excavation at the surviving pottery manufacturing sites. The sites, particularly the rural ones, exhibit fantastic preservation and I'm racing against time to learn from them. In the potteries I've studied thus far, I've been able to examine the chemistry of the pot sherds from the excavations. Different deposits of fragments from the potter's waster dumps exhibit statistically different average chemistry! The pottery seems different, not just from one pottery to another, but also within each pottery itself. The broken pottery fragments from the bottom layer of an excavation unit are chemically alike, but as a group they are different from the sherds nearer the surface.

Consider what this means. The different deposits, which I'll also call features, date from different periods of time. Following careful excavation and recording of features on the site, I will be able to compare the chemistry of the broken waste the potter discarded through time with the raw clay the potter used. Given features from the first occupation of the site, I hope to learn how each potter experimented with the new raw clays and figured out how to make pots in each radically new place. Can you imagine the challenges, leaving a pottery factory in Denmark or England for a rural basin town in the desert? The specialized factory worker "relearned" how to make pots from scratch. Its rare to have the opportunity to study how individual people dealt with such challenges in human history.

Of course, I can only do this when the production site has not had the features disturbed by modern digging from construction or bottle-hunting. Everyone must understand how rare and signficant these sites are in America-- people interested in heritage and vernacular arts in other parts of the country envy the completness and potential contained in these sites. I believe most reasonable people agree that the potential to learn from these sites far outweighs the emotional satisfaction that one person might get from digging haphazardly to discover a few warped kiln waster fragments they end up storing in a coffee can in their garage. The owners of most of the sites are interested in protecting them. Mr. David Hoff of Salt Lake City, for example, held off undertaking some work on his house for two years while I set up for the 2005 field school. We'll excavate the areas of Frederick Petersen's pottery shop that he'd have damaged with this project. Everyone in the community can help by keeping an eye on the more rural sites and doing what they can to keep them from being vandalized.

The potters' lives tell remarkable stories which intersect with many academic themes: colonization, globalization, modernity, adaptation, technology transfer, political economy, and political ecology. Take a class with me sometime and we'll talk about it!

There's lots more information about the Utah Pottery Project at the main website.

West Point Foundry Archaeology Project

There's a great deal of information about our department's flagship research project at WestPointFoundry.org. I've developed some specific research interests at the site. You should check the basic history at the project's website, but here is a brief summary. The West Point Foundry served as one of America's first heavy ordinance manufactory. Built following the war of 1812, the directors created a revolutionary industrial center- vertically integrated and technologically advanced. Until the factory finally shut down in the 1910s, they manufactured all manner of iron artifacts. Among the developments were many important firsts for America: our first domestically manufactured locomotive steam engines, hundreds of Parrott cannon and hundreds of thousands of shells (world-famous for their rifled accuracy and powerful size), sugar and cotton milling machines, aqueducts, building facades, bridges, ship hulls and boilers, etc. The product list was extensive and significant.

The people who staffed the foundry, including the owners, engineers, and workers, contributed to several incremental improvements in the iron industry. Their achievements were more than just technical. This was a very early example of vertical integration- where the company controlled the entire process from mine to the market. They extracted the ore; cut wood and manufactured the charcoal; smelted pigs and blooms; wrought and cast objects large and small; bored, lathed, tooled, and otherwise machined the products; and finally shipped them off to the consumer. They did all this at a time when industrial espionage meant stealing skilled workers, a practice the foundry operators understood quite well.

I'm interested in the same questions here as I am in Utah- technological creativity; ideology and economy; and the connections between a place (landscape), a process of production (iron foundry), and the different belief systems that evolved there.

Take this for example. (More text under construction!)

Field School Information