An Archaeology of Unchecked Capitalism is Paul Shackel's recent addition to the growing list of published research on race and labor in the anthracite coal region of northeast Pennsylvania to come out of the Anthracite Heritage Project since 2009. Shackel explicitly outlines three challenges at the outset of the volume as “providing historical and archaeological documentation in a local context (here in the United States), examining the consequences of unchecked capitalism, and then connecting these same issues to contemporary industrial practices in the developing world” (p. 3). Overall, Shackel presents a compressed but insightful historical archaeology of “trauma, destruction, migration, racism, and industrial capitalism” (p. 7).
The book includes five substantive chapters bookended by an introduction and conclusion. In the opening chapter, Shackel introduces readers to the setting and context of his study by weaving together complex histories of racialization, industrial production, labor, unionization, and immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His exploration highlights how dubious science guided public perceptions of race and justified perpetuating the immigrant “other” as an industrial class of disposable laborers. New immigrants—a diverse group composed of non-English speaking “Slavs” from Southern and Eastern Europe who occupied the least desirable, lowest-paid jobs in the coal industry—are the primary subjects of subsequent chapters. The book moves from a national and regional scale in Chapter 1 to the local and household scale in Chapter 2 to reveal how “race and the racialization of populations impacted the everyday lives of workers and their families” (p. 29). Shackel synthesizes data drawn from oral histories, primary and secondary sources, and archaeology in two areas of Lattimer No. 2 to construct a meaningful but familiar narrative. He finds that many of the new immigrants occupied cramped shanties built of reclaimed wood and hardware, and that, over time, miners and their families found strategic ways to mitigate the oppressive, impoverished conditions by improving or relocating their homes, terracing the landscape, planting house gardens, and building cesspools to ameliorate the accumulation of wastewater in streets, alleys, and yards.
Chapter 3 focuses on the long-term consequences of coal mining on both the environment and the health and well-being of descendant communities that continue to reside in the anthracite region. Here, Shackel paints a vivid picture of transformed and degraded landscapes, contaminated waterways, and persistent dangers of subsidence wrought by coal mining. Many mines, now abandoned, continue to wreak havoc on local environments while pollution from active mines—such as noise, carbon dioxide, and coal dust—exacerbates these issues and threatens the health of local populations. Shackel's scrutiny of data on intergenerational trauma, however, is the strongest contribution to the chapter. First, he establishes how long-term structural violence prevailed in the anthracite region. For example, faunal remains and food-related items excavated from several coal patch towns indicate that miners and their families were perpetually on “the verge of starvation” (p. 60). He then convincingly connects persistent poverty, unemployment, and hunger to the comparatively high rate of death from coronary heart disease among residents of the anthracite region today. Shackel leaves no doubt that “historic forms of structural violence have left northeastern Pennsylvania without an optimistic future” (p. 71).
Chapter 4 recounts the introduction of silk and textile production to the anthracite coal region during the first decade of the twentieth century and the gradual deindustrialization of northeastern Pennsylvania shortly thereafter. Shackel estimates that by 1920, as many as 5,000 poverty-stricken men, women, and children were working for pittance in mills and factories in the town of Hazleton. Coinciding with a sharp decline in coal mining, runaway factories offshored production in the 1930s and 1940s. The second half of this chapter further emphasizes the consequential nature of unchecked capitalism by following the destructive flow of capital in the garment industry from northeastern Pennsylvania to developing countries such as the Northern Mariana Islands and Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s.
Shackel then returns to the mine industry in Chapter 5, this time focusing on the Lonmin's Marikana Platinum Mine in South Africa and the Soma Mine in Turkey. His point here is that labor uprisings and exploitative practices are neither isolated nor relegated to the recent past. The murder of 34 strikers in South Africa by police in 2012 and a devastating mine fire that claimed the lives of 301 Turkish miners in 2014 are just two examples of the oppressive and unsafe working conditions that continue to characterize unchecked capitalism.
Shackel meets his goals for the book. He documents how immigrant laborers coped with the contours of their racialized landscape and economic marginalization in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. Yet, his extensive examination of intergenerational trauma and his dedication to exposing the transhistorical, global nature of structural violence and unchecked capitalism are his greatest achievements. The book and project also showcase the promising value of what the author refers to as “heritage work,” which, from this reviewer's understanding, combines the strengths of action research, community collaboration, and critical theory with historical archaeology's ability to make meaningful connections between past and present, local and global.
