Industrial Ecology: The Holistic Approach
Timothy Sandiford
The issues we are concerned with in this week’s seminar revolve around the
concepts of industrial ecology and multi-craft industries. For the purposes of this
response paper I will mainly concentrate on the concepts of industrial ecology.
However, as we will see later, the distinction between these two subjects is blurred,
and in fact it could be suggested that an analysis of multi-craft industries would be a
vital component within the industrial ecological approach, as applied to
archaeology.
So the first task is to establish what we mean when we speak of an ‘industrial
ecological’ approach to industry and production. Graedel et al. (1993) state that it is
an ‘ensemble’ concept, which brings together elements from many different fields of
enquiry, which (specifically relating it to modern industry) has as its goal the
‘achievement of sustainable development practices’ (1993:18). This points us
immediately to the fact that like very many analytical concepts used within
archaeology it was not developed by the discipline, but rather stems from the
concern amongst industrial scientists that human actions were “change[ing] the
environment in ways that rival natural causes.” (Gordon 2001:1) The paper by
Graedel et al. (1993) sets out how an industrial ecological would work to harmonize
industrial process to mitigate or remove harmful environmental consequences.
However, the approach taken (and explained in Graedel et al.) is an explicitly
‘scientific’ technique that uses direct quantitative observations to define the base
data from which the industrial ecology of a specific mode of production (either
established or proposed) is modeled. The flow diagrams, which result in this
analysis, are unequivocal and unambiguous, the results and conclusions testable by
direct observation. In short, everything that archaeological material is not.
However, R. B. Gordon’s A Landscape Transformed takes on industrial
ecology and turns it to use in examining a past industrial landscape, that of
Salisbury, Connecticut. Within these chapters Gordon puts forth how industrial
ecology can be utilized within a historical perspective, and how we can hitch a
scientific model of analysis to wagon of archaeology as an embodiment of past
action. He states that “An ecology of industry has to deal with the culture and the
values held by people, as well as with the technical analysis of materials and energy
flows. History sheds light on the long-term consequences in industrialization and on
how a community’s values affect decisions its citizens make about the environment.”
(2001:2) before going on to write that “History offers the perspective of decades or
centuries of cultural change and reveals how shifting cultural values direct peoples’
impact on the environment. We can improve our chances of separating and
identifying the physical and cultural components of a regions industrial ecology by
studying a community whose economy placed heavy demands on its natural
resources to support a single, dominant industry.” (2001:3) The latter quote is
really how Gordon sees the articulation between industrial ecology and archaeology.
I would argue that this deployment of industrial ecology as a holistic mode of
examination is useful and correct. However, I do not think that Gordon (in the
sections we read) really addressed whether this is indeed Industrial Ecology.
Rather, I would argue that the nature of the evidence we have for past societies,
even within contexts which written records, could be termed Industrial Archaeology
Lite. In that our results for the most part will never be through direct observation of
the system in question, and therefore the results we get, although they could be
qualitative (for example within archaeological materials science) are not
unmediated. Now this of course is a theme that issues siren like from my mouth at
many different junctures in this seminar series. I state it here, however, not as an
end point, an inescapable bind, but rather as a dissonant note and suggestion that
within archaeology it needs to be better distinguished from it’s science and
technology roots.
Rather, I suggest that the mode of industrial ecology that Gordon uses is both
comprehensive and informative. Two of the parts of his analysis that I found most
informative were in the areas of technological choice, mediated through education,
as a dynamic process through time. That “Despite their commitment to liberal
education, Salisbury people rarely extended their reading to natural science or
technology. Salisbury artisans made iron using 17th century techniques, and their
letters and business records hardly ever mention technical matters.” It shows that
while the population was interested in education, how that education was deployed,
to whom, and what was taught and valued had deep effects of the continuation of
the industrial process. The second point that I would like to highlight would be the
‘naturalization’ of the industrial landscape, that “Salisbury residents rarely (if ever)
mentioned the environmental effects of iron making in their letters, newspapers, or
reminiscences: they saw the working landscape as tolerable, or unremarkable.”
(Gordon 2001) Again though to sound my trumpet of disquiet, the standards of
evidence to which Gordon had access where atypical within archaeology, and
extreme when compared to the analysis of prehistoric societies.
Within the title to this response paper and within my introduction I alluded to what
I see as the, blurred, or even maybe conjoined nature of industrial ecology and the
analysis of multicraft industries. Within the readings nowhere is this clearer than in
the paper written by Shimada & Wagner ‘A Holistic Approach to Pre-Hispanic Craft
Production” Nowhere within this chapter is the term industrial ecology used, rather
they term their approach as ‘holistic’. Yet I suggest that the mode of investigation
they propose is a ‘native’ archaeologically born version of industrial ecology. They
start their analysis with a well founded assault upon the analysis of ancient craft
production as it has been practices thus far (pre- 2007) in archaeology, namely
using ethnoarchaeology, the ‘cultural biography of objects’, and the organization of
production and the relationship to the sociopolitical form of complexity. To state it
simply they believe that theses approaches have fragmented the study of ancient
craft industries; this is where the ‘holistic approach’ comes in. They define the
approach as the “The holistic approach can be summarized as the comprehensive
delineation of both material–technological and social–ideological components of the
craft production system (including crafting, nature, and social relations of craft
persons and their product) as well as elucidation of its regional historical, natural,
and social contacts.” (2007:167) With the result that studies illustrate how different
components interconnect and augment each other to yield knowledge that would
not be gained had the study narrowly focused itself on one particular aspect of
production. Indeed, in their analysis of the pyrotechnology used within the Middle
Sican culture we can see that this is an industrial ecological approach to a multi-craft
industry. Where the combined analysis of both industries together yields valuable
information about both, which I suggest would not have been the case had the two
industries been splits into the ceramics and metallurgical analysis. Indeed the whole
is more than the sum of its parts.