Industrial archaeology has come a long way since Kenneth Hudson defined it in 1966 as the “study of the remains of yesterday's industries” (Industrial Archaeology, 1966, p. 21). Marco Meniketti's book is in the vein of American pioneers such as George Teague, who insisted that the social consequences of industry are as much part of the story as its technology.

The Loma Prieta Mill, located near modern Santa Cruz, California, operated from 1883 to 1922, churning out 70,000 board feet of redwood and Douglas fir lumber each day to supply the San Francisco Bay Area market and beyond. Astonishingly, less than 30% of each logged tree would be sent to market, the remainder “either burned or left to rot” (p. 62). The book's six chapters cover, in turn, the history of immigration, lumbering, and milling; intersecting industries, notably shipping; labor and industrial relations; the history of Loma Prieta Mill; the excavated material culture of milling and lumbering; and class, ethnicity, and labor in the industry.

The turn of the nineteenth century does not have the cachet of the Gold Rush, but, as Meniketti demonstrates, the period is its equal in the dynamism of its social processes as well as environmental consequences. As many as 150 mostly Swiss Italian, Portuguese, and Scandinavian men toiled in the forest or at the mill. Although some were general laborers, many worked as highly skilled fallers, buckers, sawyers, timber graders, doggers, engineers, firemen, blacksmiths, and in a host of other specialties. Chinese cooks were commonly employed in spite of the nativism that infected the region. Camp management typically made use of policies to racialize the work force, restricting access to better paid jobs and assigning bunkhouses according to ethnicity.

The author deserves a shout-out for bucking what Brian Fagan has called archaeology's dirty little secret—that many excavations are never published—as this site was investigated over three seasons as San José State University's archaeological field school. Aside from plentiful historical research, oral history, and hands-on experience at a mill of the era, Meniketti describes his work at the mill's blacksmith's shop, engine and boiler base, log carriage, dam, and reservoir, among other industrial features. Discovering the remains of worker housing (cabins for the favored and bunkhouses for the rest) and their organized refuse disposal features was tempered by the fact that artifact-rich privies had been plundered by souvenir hunters.

A quibble: although fieldwork employed the metric system, standard units are also used, as in “The collapsed cabin measured 3.6 meters by 4.8 meters and was raised . . . on posts measuring six inches by six inches” (p. 135). Here, I think, modernity gets in the way of understanding. To have described the cabin as “about 12 feet by 15 feet 9 inches” would surely have better expressed the builder's mental template.

Meniketti establishes his book's easygoing tone early with a 1911 quip from humorist Ambrose Bierce that leads into an anecdote about the kilt-wearing habits of Americans and musings on ethnicity and identity that foreshadow the final chapter. This approach is reflected throughout the work as the author alternates between technical descriptions of archaeological matters and a more personal style. The book is packed with supporting data from various sources, although it is not until page 112 that we get into archaeology. This is hardly surprising given that historical archaeology is so dependent on context to make its point, and yet the format has its drawbacks. Instead of separating site structure and content into their respective chapters, the project's goals may have been better served by reuniting the excavated features with their artifacts.

With its emphasis on the interconnectedness of production and transportation, the book is a good addition to the small corpus of literature on the complex archaeology of the historic lumber industry. This network is reflected in the other industrial and social complexes that the author documents: the logging system, the milling system, and the skilled occupations that supported them, as well as the social system of the camp itself. One gets the impression of a colossal and intricate machine made up of human cogs as well as material ones. By examining that great entanglement and deriving cautious insights into how it operated, Timber, Sail, and Rail places itself in the mainstream of modern industrial archaeology.