Writing

Writing Wednesday: Writing as Habit

Last week, Josh Nudell (whose blog “Noodlings” I read quite frequently), commented on my distinction between writing as habit and writing deliberately. He suggested that for him, getting into the habit of writing helps him create a space (and time) where he can write more intentionally. I understand this.

For me, the challenge isn’t making time to write. Since the very end of my graduate school career, I’ve always managed to make time to write. In fact, it is so baked into my daily and weekly routine, that when I don’t write, I get anxious and distracted and feel off. Most of my daily writing appears on my blog or, increasingly, in my little notebook. Even as I take time to handwrite in my little notebook, the output is mostly low level writing and reflects what I consider to be low level thinking. This means it’s thinking without the benefit of research, revision, or careful consideration. In many cases my writing here represents “warm takes” conjured on walks, preliminary drafts of more serious work, or “speculatin’ on a hypothesis.” While writing in my notebook involves a more deliberate choice, when I re-read my entries, they strike me as even more casual (and careless). It turns out that even when I try to write deliberately and push myself to handwrite in a notebook, my habits of writing to write remains strong.

I reflects my tendency to write to scratch the itch to write. The problem is that over the course of a year, writing in my notebook and blog can absorb a tremendous about of time (and words!); I often write around 130k words per year here and another 30k or so in my notebook. 

Recognizing the amount that I write (which represents around 2 million words over the lifetime of my blog) has given me pause. Every day, I spend an hour or so diligently pecking away on my keyboard or scratching in my notebook. Over the course of a week, a month, or a year, this adds up. It’s time when I’m not reading, not preparing my classes, not writing for a professional audience (or really much of any audience to be honest), and not “being present.” It is sobering to realize that a significant percentage of this work is habitual writing and not driven by any greater goal than this is what I do first thing every morning.

What really brings it home is comparing my blog and notebook to my academic output (which is my job and, among other things, the basis for my salary). Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve probably managed 400k words of professional, published writing. That’s about 20% of my total writing work over this time if I allow for a generous overlap between my blog and my scholarly output. When I exclude, say, 20% of my academic writing as template driven and habitual “blah, blah, blah,” the numbers become even more bleak. The amount of my writing that represents deliberate, purposeful, and meaningful prose is even lower still.

Of course, I understand runners train many more miles than you race. We read many more books than we love. We practice more than we perform. Our habits prepare us to do things well when the circumstance demands it.

That said, humans are also prone to excess (as we are reminded daily in the media) and sometimes doing things just to do things isn’t really justifiable. When I think about my writing, I fret that my habit doesn’t justify its cost.

Writing Wednesday (on a Thursday… depending on where you are!)

This summer, I’m trying to hand write more. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been an uneven hand writer. I’ve kept a notebook that was to serve as a complement to my blog, but sometimes would go stretched where I wrote in it only once a week or so.

This summer, I purchased a Hobonichi A5 size notebook with 6 mm lined pages and ticks every 7 mm across each line. Hobonichi notebook use the very thin Tomoe River paper. At first I was pretty skeptical about such a thin paper, but it works pretty well with my Pilot Prera fountain pen and there is some shadowing but no bleed through. As advertised, the paper is smooth and I prefer it to the ubiquitous Moleskine and Leuchtturm1917 paper. It’s an added bonus that the notebook will lie flat. 

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I am a pretty habitual writer and I try to pen between 500 and 1000 words per day about five days a week. Not all of the words are good — in fact, most of them aren’t — but I like to think that many of them are better than no words.

In the Polis storeroom and in the Isthmia dig house, I prefer not to carry my notebook. I’m not sure why this is, but I tend to think about writing in my Hobonichi (and even my home Leuchtturm1917 notebook as something that I do deliberately. It isn’t a place for notes or lists or sketches or things like that. Because of this quirk, I carry a small A5 MD graph paper notebook with me to use in more casual situations. It replaces a small Leuchtturm1917 B5 notebook with a yellow cover.

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The advantage of the MD A5 gridded notebook is once again the paper. I got used to the smooth MD paper this year when I used a A4 size MD notebook for my teaching notes. I find the MD paper works particularly well with my Caran d’Ache 849 rollerball pen. This notebook is for everything from quick notes, lists, and even some casual writing. 

This summer, I’m trying very hard to avoid doing things out of habit (even when they are good ones) and instead, be deliberate. Writing deliberately rather than habitually has been a struggle over recent years and I am never quite sure when my excitement to put words on the page starts to tip over into a compulsion. So far, this summer, I think I’m keeping the latter in check and pen and paper helps.

Writing Wednesday: Roman Fineware from Polis

Over the last few days, I’m grinding out a bit of text based on an assemblage of frneware from Polis on Cyprus. This is in the service of a larger project that I’ve been describing over the last few weeks. 

It’s been slow going and quite frustrating, but words on the page count especially when it’s writing Wednesday.

Fineware

Scholars have generally argued that Eastern Sigillata A, produced somewhere in Syria or elsewhere in the northern Levantine coast, and Cypriot Sigillata produced somewhere in Western Cyprus or on the neighboring Anatolian coast constitute the two most common forms of Roman period fine ware on the island. For the deposits in E.F2 at Polis the ratio of CS to ESA is around 4:1. This reveals the dominance of CS at the site during the Roman period.

The area of the trenches S06 and T06 represents a series of contexts associated with the leveling fill for the basilica, the construction of the apse of the church, and earlier Roman activities associated with the construction of various walls, the levigation pool, and the kiln. As a result, trenches T06 and S06 produced more chronologically narrow contexts than the area as a whole with a number of clear Roman period contexts present. Since many of the contexts are relatively small, we aggregated the material from both trenches to produce quantitatively meaningful sample of Roman period artifacts. These two trenches, with their numerous Roman contexts, produced a different story. They revealed a more even ratio of ESA to CS which approaches 3:2 (57.7% CS and 42.3% ESA). This may speak to the comparatively earlier date of Roman material present in the complicated S06/T06 assemblage in general compared to the more diachronically representative assemblage from E.F2 more broadly.

The differences between the larger, diachronic and area-wide assemblage from E.F2 and the small, more chronologically narrow assemblage from trenches T06 and S06 reveals some of the complexities for understanding the circulation of Roman fine wares on Cyprus. For example, in the immediate hinterland of Paphos, the substantial sample of Roman fine wares from the unstratified surface assemblage from CPSP produced a wide range of CS forms which appeared in a 3:2 ratio with ESA. What distinguished this assemblage from EF2 at Polis is the quantity of imported Italian and Aegean imports which presumably offered an alternative both to Eastern imports and regional Cypriot Sigillata.

This interpretation would align with the long-standing positions of John Lund, John Hayes, and others who advocated for a western Cyprus center for the production of Cypriot Sigillata perhaps in the region of Soloi, Paphos, or the southern coast of Anatolia. They argue that in Western Cyprus, ready access to CS mitigated the popularity of ESA particularly in the later 1st and early 2nd century of our era. At Paphos, for example, Italian imports complement CS forms evidently at the expense of ESA. After the middle of the 2nd century, however, stratified deposits become less common and our understanding of the latest forms of CS become correspondingly less clear. Conversely, on the Eastern part of the island ESA was more common in relation to CS until the 2nd century AD when CS became the most common fine ware (Marquié 2002).

The challenge of understanding the assemblage at Polis, then is both one of chronology and one of regionalism. Chronologically, the larger, Late Roman assemblage of material from across the area of E.F2 captured residual examples of a wider range of CS forms that were later and more common than ESA forms in Western Cyprus after the 1st century AD. Material from trenches S06 and T06, in contrast, produced more earlier forms of ESA which reflected the generally earlier date of deposition throughout this trench and the clear mingling of earlier deposits — such as the one that produced the lamps — with later deposits in the local constitution of the basilica leveling fill.

The diversity of forms present in the S06/T06 assemblage offers a window into the distribution of ESA and CS at Polis. The forms present in these levels are unsurprisingly similar to those found at Paphos and from the CPSP survey with even the rarer forms such as CS31 and CS41 appearing elsewhere in Western Cyprus either on the Canadian Palaiopaphos Survey Project, the House of Dionsysios, or excavations at the Paphos Agora. Further east, The Amathous gate cemetery at Kourion lacks the earliest forms of CS while producing most of the later forms including CS31 and CS41. The assemblage of CS from Kition-Bamboula was similar and included the less common later forms CS41 and the more common CS29. In contrast, the smaller inland site of Panayia-Ematousa produced only some of the most common forms present at Polis (CS11, CS12, CS22, and CS40).

Writing Wednesday: Acknowledgements

Writing acknowledgements is always gratifying if a bit bitter-sweet. For me, at least, it marks the end of a project and I get more joy from the doing than the having. Yesterday morning, I wrote the acknowledgements for my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and submitted the revised draft to the press.

I was happy to acknowledge to all the people who contributed in various, often subtle ways to this project. 

Acknowledgements

I wrote most of this book as my dad became ill. He got me interested in photography when I was a younger. He took me to buy my first camera, my first digital camera, and mentored me as much as I was willing to listen. At some moment in my life and with the help of my colleagues, I became an adequate technical photographer and the photographs in this volume are a testimony to that adequacy.

As my dad’s health failed I started to take more photographs on my daily walks in a local park and around the house. While the photos in this book are deliberate in a technical sense, they lacked any self-conscious awareness of photography as craft. My recent photographs, in contrast, have sought to capture something more than technical details. Photographer John Holmgren introduced me to the phrase “make photographs” in the Bakken. I now try to “make photographs” even if the photos in this book are merely taken. As I finished this book, I came to realize that my shift to more deliberate photography represents a kind of embodied memorial to my dad. My attention to light, the fussing with camera settings, the framing of objects and scenes, and my posture all served to commemorate my dad through how I move, look at the world, and ”make photographs.”

This book would not have been possible without the collegiality, friendship, and support of the members of the North Dakota Man Camp Project: Bret Weber, Richard Rothaus, and Kostis Kourelis. Photographers Kyle Cassidy, John Holmgren, Richard Rothaus, and Ryan Stander all showed me how they made photographs. Richard Rothaus, in particular, shared his love of cameras with me and helped me think about photography more than he realizes in our walks around the village of Ancient Corinth, with our cameras at the hottest time of the day. Kostis Kourelis brought the technical vocabulary of an architectural historian and the careful eye of an archaeologist to my work and always encouraged me to stick with the evidence while also framing the project more broadly and thoughtfully. Bret Weber talked to people. He conducted the interviews in Appendix I and made sure that our enthusiasm for material culture did not overshadow the human element our work. Aaron Barth, Carenlee Barkdull, Sebastian Braun, Kyle Conway, and Ryan Low shared insights at various points in this project and Ryan allowed me to present my work in his class. My friends and colleagues on the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) standing committee and who presented at CHAT conferences inspired me to write this book. Jacqueline Senior and Dan Etches Jones at BAR encouraged and supported my work and expressed appropriate and productive skepticism. My colleagues in the department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota and in our faculty writing group created a conducive and supportive space for writing during some very difficult semesters.

My wife, Susan Caraher, has stood by and watched me work on this strange project with her usual patience and support. I wish I had shared more about it with her as I wrote and I’m sure it would have been better for it. Our dogs, Argie and Milo, have listened to me talk at them and Argie has learned to stop when I am fussing with my camera.

It goes without saying that the problems with this book and its limitations are my own. The book has many of them, but I do hope that it is still useful to some people who are interested in bringing an archaeologist’s eye to the contemporary world.

This book is about photography and as I finished the book, my dad passed away. My dad taught me to be curious and tried to convince me to slow down and look carefully at things. I’m not sure my dad would have enjoyed this book or the photographs. That said, the work of writing this book, thinking about photography, and taking photos while I wrote, however, helped me to connect with my memories of him even as he was slipping away. In that way, this book brought me closer to him and to honor that I dedicate this book to his memory.

Writing Wednesday: Change Over Time in the Bakken

Over the few weeks, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. Here’s part 1, part 2, part 3, and below is the fourth of four parts.

III.4: Conclusions

The North Dakota Man Camp Project witnessed significant changes over the five years worth of time spent traveling, visiting, and documenting workforce housing in the Bakken. As I have already noted, by then, some of the most visible temporary and improvised Type 3 camps, such as the famous Walmart parking lot camp, had already vanished and the small Type 3 camps like the one described in section 3 had become rare. This reflects the steady growth in the number of beds in the Bakken region in hotels, Type 1 and Type 2 camps, and new housing starts (Caraher et al. 2017, 269; Caraher and Weber 2020, 292; Hodur et al. 2022). By 2014, the demographic boom that had shaped the Bakken region had begun to subside (Conway 2020) and housing pressure released (albeit with persistent complications: Gershenson et al. 2024). As early as 2014, our fieldwork had begun to reveal changes to the material conditions present in workforce housing sites. As a way of concluding this appendix, this section looks to manage the tension between local responses to the boom and the fragmented reality that the region experienced as the specter of a bust came into view.

In 2012, a stay at Capital Lodge near Tioga, a large Type 1 camp, required an involved registration process, payment by wire transfer, and detailed check in. The camp was bustling, the parking lot full of trucks, the dining hall crowded at breakfast and dinner, and the food options plentiful and diverse. In 2015, when we returned, the camp was nearly empty, the dining hall quiet, the registration and check-in process simplified. It ceased operation later that year and after a few failed attempts to get the area rezoned for a hotel, the camp was dismantled leaving only the inflatable quonset hut, broken PVC piping, piles of pressure treated lumber, and the forlorn gatehouse remaining. Elsewhere in the region, the large Type 1 camps that lined US 85 on its route into Williston have similarly vanished leaving only footprints behind. Those within Williston city limits sought to avoid a September 1, 2017 deadline for their removal through a series of lawsuits, but this merely delayed the inevitable. In 2015, the abortive Great American Lodge, financed by a Ponzi-scheme, sat unopened with towels resting on the feet neatly made beds and a well appointed dining hall still awaiting new guests. A year later, workers were removing the units for transportation to new sites elsewhere. Finally, the “stackables” at the eastern border of Mountrail county by 2015 and a visit in 2016 showed signs of squatting. By 2018, the stackables were gone. Today, most of these sites remain unoccupied and those around Tioga, for example, have not returned to agricultural use.

Type 2 camps likewise showed a contraction. Some of the more remote camps, such as the ragtag Type 2 that developed amid the abandoned town of Wheelock disappeared as early as 2013. The dry camp north of Alexander, where we met the fisher, had a few mobile homes installed in 2013 and by 2015, the camp was largely abandoned. Today it is a storage lot for hay and farm equipment. The camp that had taken over the lots around the old school at Ross, North Dakota, between Stanley and Tioga was bustling between 2012-2014 before slowly contracting and disappearing by 2018. A 84-lot camp to the north of the rail line that bisects Ross showed a pattern of decline typical of larger Type 2 camps. The camp opened in 2013 financed by investors from Arizona and operated by a manger from Georgia. By December 2014 showed signs of RVs being pulled out in the dead of winter leaving behind an outline of skirting and exposed PVC sewage pipes. By March 2015, the camp was even more run down with entire mudrooms sitting in lots exposed to the elements where the trailer had been removed (Caraher and Weber 2013, 101). In two short years, the general state of the camp declined with more trash, abandoned lots, and more weathered and damaged units. MC11, documented in the photographs in this book, represents a more gradual decline characteristic of the larger camps closer to larger towns. It opened in 2012 and could accommodate nearly 300 units. Over the next five years, its fortunes ebbed and flowed as the previous section showed. Changes in ownership, in management, and in occupancy rates shaped the character of the camp. In the winter of 2013/2014, the camp suffered when the septic and water system froze leaving residents without water or toilets for over a week. By 2014, s interview with camp employees (see Appendix I) showed, there was less talk about community and more a the trash, vehicles, human waste, and drug paraphernalia left behind. Residents and employees also observed that some of the community oriented activities that occurred in previous years had declined in the camp. There were no more children’s movie nights, craft bees, and fewer casual conversations in the the camp. There were more vacant lots, more RVs with eviction notices on them, and more abandoned cars, RVs, and mudrooms.

The material conditions at the various man camps offers evidence for the Bakken “bust.” The empty lots, eviction notices, and shifting concerns toward abandonment, waste, and post-boom strategies would appear to mark a point in trajectory from boom to bust. At the same time, counter narratives existed. Residents and camp managers, for example, continued to express a sense of optimism that we called “Bakktimism” (Caraher et al. 2020: 300). In this narrative, the bust is illusory or temporary and the situation of the moment whether captured in a photograph, an interview, or a description in a notebook does not provide evidence for a larger trend. The willingness to fragment the present and to contend that it need not fit into a trajectory required by our commitment to a boom/bust cycle demonstrated in practical, everyday terms, the contingent instability of the contemporary.

Writing Wednesday: The Units

Over the few weeks, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. Here’s part 1 and part 2, and below is the third of three parts.

III.3: The Units

The organization of the camps reflected a complex interplay between camp owners, managers, housing units, infrastructural needs, capital, and residents. These affordances created distinctive spaces that shaped life in the camps themselves. In Type 1 camps, for example, the modular design of the housing units offered a number of standard rooms generally aligned along a hallway. The width of the unit — generally standardized for transportation by rail and by road — dictated the side of the unit. At some camps, a “double wide” arrangement of two units joined together longitudinally created a central, double-loaded corridor illuminated with florescent lights and floored with institutional carpets. In other cases, the modular design allowed for wider public areas for dining or recreation. Capital Lodge near Tioga featured an inflatable quonset-style roof over a large buffet dining room (Caraher and Weber 2017, 62-63). Many of the units had entry areas where workers could take off coats, boots, and other gear and some had locker room style mudrooms where coats hung above boots in open alcoves. The standardized rooms were clean and simple often featuring single beds, small bathrooms, and writing desks affixed to the wall. There was limited space for customization. The exterior area around units featured gravel paths, boot cleaners mounted near most doors, and little else to distinguish one unit from another. The one exception was small hibachi-style grills which stood out against the otherwise bland uniformity. One resident of the Bakken described Type 1 camps as “just the same thing over and over … there’s no community about it. ’Cause you’re in there, it’s like this big system. [laughs] You come in, you eat, they take everything from you, you shower, you’re gone” (Caraher et al. 2020, 300).

At the height of the boom, the main alternative for people moving to the region for work were Type 2 camps. Despite the structure imposed by the arrangement of water, sewage and electrical hooks ups, Type 2 camps showed significant diversity in the individual units. In MC11, for example, residents planted gardens, built raised walkways using shipping pallets, created comfortable and well-appointed outdoor living areas with picnic tables, grills, personalized decorations, and even, in one instance, a dog run (Caraher et al. 2017, 281-283). Small gardens with both flowers and vegetables were not unusual features in the region and they seemed to complement seasonal decorations such as colorful garden flags and holiday decorations for July 4th and at Christmas. The most dramatic intervention in Type 2 camps were the elaborate mudrooms constructed by residents (Caraher et al. 2017, 278-280). These structures leaned against the side of the RV enclosing creating a vestibule outside the door of the unit. The simplest mudrooms featured a shed roof and plywood walls. Some sat directly on the ground, but in other cases, cinderblocks elevated the mudroom floor to the same level as the entrance to the RV. In their simplest form, these features provide additional space to remove work clothes before entering the RV. In their most elaborate expression, however, they expanded the living space of the RV with seating areas and sometimes sleeping areas (see Appendix I, interview with Ryan Miller), provided storage space for tools and appliances, and relieved some of the cramped conditions present in the RVs themselves (for an example see Appendix I interview with Karen Clancy). By 2013, most camps had started to impose more formal restrictions of the size and structure of mudrooms including MC11 (See Appendix I interview with Jennifer Holmes and Angela Lawrence). This resulted in smaller rooms with less adventurous architecture. In the winter, residents often installed skirting around the base of their units to both insulate the unit and the water and sewage lines (Caraher et al. 2017, 276-277). The skirting also created space for secure storage under the unit. Storage appears to have been a problem with some residents building shelving units, others installing prefabricated garden sheds, and others piling equipment, water coolers, empty propane tanks, tires, frames for skirting, and other large objects along the length of their units (Caraher et al. 2017, 280-281). Some units had children play areas outside reminding us that Type 2 camps were more accommodating to children than Type 1 facilities.

Our sample of Type 3 camps was too small to allow any generalizations about the kinds of units. The one Type 3 camp that we documented most carefully reflected a wide array of living circumstances from a single tent on the ground to small “fifth wheel” RV, and a larger travel trailer. The lack of utility hook ups allowed residents to arrange the units in a circle around an open common area where storage, a picnic table, and cooking could take place. The small size of the fifth-wheel RV and the tent made cooking and storage inside those spaces impossible contributing in part to the common area. The presence of portapotties around the edges of the camp likewise reflected the limited facilities in the units. More modest units and lack of hook ups produced common spaces. This arrangement had social implications: an older resident of the camp living in a tent had been struggling to find work and recently diagnosed as a diabetic. The camaraderie of the camp kept his spirits up and looked after him.

Writing Wednesday: Types of Camps

Over the last week, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. I posted the first part of it last week. Here’s the second of three parts.

III.2 Types of Camps

This section starts where the last left off. the most contingent camps that appeared in shelter belts, public parks, quiet back lots, and work sites shared certain characteristics that reflected their ad hoc arrangement and situation. We defined these as “Type 3” camps (Caraher et al. 2017, 270-271). They lacked formal hooks up for electricity, water, and sewage, and as a result, adapted to suit the needs of the residents rather than the infrastructure. The most famous example of a “Type 3” style camp is probably the Williston Walmart parking lot that attracted national attention in the early days of the boom. New arrivals traveling by RV to the region gathered here and took advantage of Walmart’s longstanding tolerance of overnighting RVs in their parking lot while they looked for work and better accommodations. By the time we started to visit the Bakken regularly, this camp as well as many other ad hoc camps in the city of Williston had dispersed as much because of growing public safety concerns as better options for housing. In many of cases, the residents of these camps were squatters and the camps were illegal. Our project did document one such camp where the residents described the availability of work, but few housing options (Caraher et al. 2016, 203). As a result, they camped in a shelter belt near a construction site where some of the residents worked. They had arranged their trailers around a public area where they had created an ad hoc kitchen and some space for socializing. One resident of the camp lived in a tent and has been unable to find steady work in the region. The others in the camp provided him with friendship and support. The residents of this Type 3 camp, which included two teenagers who were there visiting their father, recognized the advantages of living together including camaraderie, cooperation on domestic tasks, and socializing at an improvised horseshoe pit. They also complained that the lack of running water, their reliance on portapotties, and the unreliability of electricity provided by extension cords run from the nearby construction site. They had lived at the site long enough to express a growing concern for sanitation and attributed the presence of flies with the people going to the bathroom in the open. When we returned to the site several months later, the camp was gone leaving only some trash. People in the area informed us that the police had removed the camp.

The most common camps in the region were Type 1 and Type 2 camps. Type 1 camps were the largest and most formal camps in the region (Caraher et al. 2017, 269-270). They were mostly characterized by prefabricated housing units with the largest offering hundreds of individual hotel style rooms. Large and even global logistics companies operate many of these camps and have agreements with the largest oilfield companies and as such they operate a bit like company towns. There were some independent Type 1 camps, including Capital Lodge which stood on US Route 2 outside of of Tioga (Caraher and Weber 2017, 62-63) and the some smaller companies which operated groups of camps in the region such as Ponderosa or the ill-fated Great American lodge which was part of a multinational Ponzi scheme. The most formal Type 1 camps had restricted access, strict rules for residents, and dining rooms, fitness centers, and social spaces with large TVs and comfortable furnishings. They operated much like an hotel where workers would stay during their multi-week shift in the region. Like hotels, these camps provided bedding and towels, featured generic wall art — usually consisting of patriotic and vaguely “western scenes”— that complemented the institutional food and furnishings of these impersonal accommodations. The largest of these camps while condoned as a “necessary evil” by local governments, nevertheless strained local infrastructure especially sewage. As a result at least one Type 1 camp near Tioga had its own sewage treatment facility and touted its temporary, modular approach for its low environmental impact (Rothaus 2013). Less formal Type 1, such as the “stackables” near the Enbridge terminal at the eastern edge of Mountrail County or the Ponderosa near Alexander, had fewer amenities but allowed for greater customization by residents who often stayed longer and could even bring their families.

Type 2 camps, such as the one documented in the photographs in this book, offered a combination of visibility and complexity that made them attractive to the archaeologist’s gaze. These camps have a parallels with RV parks and camping areas where the hook ups for electricity, water, and sewage dictate the organization of the units often in neat rows. Lot size varied from the largest being over 2500 square feet and smaller camps offering less than 1000 square feet per RV. In camps with large lots, such as MC11 documented in this volume (Caraher and Weber 2017, 72-73), residents often parked their RVs, fifth-wheel trailers, or motorhomes on one side of the lot, leaving the rest of the lot open for parking, storage and outdoor activity space. The largest Type 2 camps could accommodate several hundred RVs. MC11, for example, offered over 300 lots after a series of additions during the boom, while the smallest consisted of only a dozen or so units. The smaller camps often lacked even an office for the occasional site manager. In fact, one resident of a Type 2 camp recalls that early in the boom people just “swarmed” to camps and either waited to be kicked out or to be charged rent (Caraher et al. 2017, 270). In other cases, Type 2 camps had more developed amenities including laundry facilities, playgrounds for children, public spaces for socializing and events, wifi, maintenance personnel, and onsite managers. These larger camps often had areas where managers stored discarded material from the various modifications made to the residents’ RVs including the framing for winterized skirts around the bottom edges of the RVs, sheets of plywood from demolished mudrooms, propane tanks, shipping pallets, and PVC piping for optimizing utilities hook ups. As the interviews in Appendix I show, the managers of Type 2 camps sometimes sought to emphasize that their facility was a community and a place to call home (Caraher et al. 2020, 301; Caraher and Weber 2023, 102)). At MC11 camp managers planted trees and offered them to residents to beautify their lots, built playgrounds for children at the camp, and planned a pool room and horseshoe pit for adults. Other camp Residents of MC11, however, sometimes told a different story complaining about the transient nature of onsite management, frozen water and sewage pipes, questionable personal safety in the camp, and contentious lawsuits between the camp’s owners and operators. Frozen pipes and inadequate or substandard infrastructure often plagued these hastily planned and constructed camps (Caraher and Weber 2023, 102).

Writing Wednesday: Revising the Introduction

I’m neck deep in revising my book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken. I wrote a bit about what I was planning to do last week, and I am more or less on schedule despite struggling to find the time and the space to write consistently. 

Here is part of my revised introduction (which I called a “prelude” in my earlier organization of the book) which establishes the organization of the book. At the suggestion of the reviewers, I’ve integrated some of the key authors that the book engages with here in the introduction to the chapters on the recommendation of the reviewers. You can compare what I have here to what I wrote in January last year. I think their guidance has made this section better.

The book is organized around four chapters with three parts each. The style of these chapters deliberately mimics the capacity of photographs to create fragments. These fragments embrace the the potential of abrupt juxtapositions to produce unexpected connections. Each section of the book, despite being aggregated into chapters, has ties to the others, but also stands alone as a statement much in the way that a photograph stands alone as a statement. As part of this fragmentary and fragmented approach, the sections offer context to the photographs, but do not draw upon the photos as evidence nor do they provide an template for reading the photographs that encourages a particular outcome or interpretation. Instead, this introduction offers a broadly mimetic parallel to the photographs which is open ended and riven with potential contradictions, inconsistencies, and challenges to a linear narrative.

The first chapter of this book starts with our fieldwork in the Bakken oil patch. Three short sections provide some preliminary remarks on the various North Dakota oil booms, the study of workforce housing, and the character of the following book. I discuss the challenges that led us to use photography as our primary method for documenting and encountering the Bakken and how our first publications engaged with the concepts of mobility led us both to the experiences of displacement and, ironically, tourism. My colleagues and I used the heuristic of tourism to trace the connections between settler-colonial and productive landscapes in the Bakken. Scholars such as Nick Estes, Nestor Silva, and Sebastian Braun do more to emphasize indigenous perspectives on the boom, and Estes, in particular, introduced discussed the boom and the colonial encounter against the the longer trajectory of indigenous time. This concepts of movement, displacement, booms, and time emerged as inchoate within the project’s first publications and those of other scholars working the region and form a foundation for the work of this book.

The second chapter of the book situates our work amid recent debates on the role of archaeology in providing critical perspectives not only on the development of the modern industrialized world, but also on our contemporary society. Industrial archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary world are, in many ways, the archaeology of fossil fuels and during the 20th and 21st century, and this means the archaeology of oil. To do this, this chapter connects the archaeology of worker housing — especially in the works of Stephen Mzozowski, Michael Roller and Paul Shackel — to the emerging field of the archaeology of oil. Chris Witmore’s view of oil using Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject which exceeds our capacity to append its totality presents a theoretical perspective on the expansive character of Caroline Hein’s concept of “petroleumscapes.” Thinking of the archaeology of oil at this scale offers a context not just to workforce housing in the Bakken, but also the broader field of archaeology of the contemporary world. I conclude this chapter by considering how oil suffuses Alfredo González-Ruibal’s “supermodernity” and inscribes violence of the contemporary moment across the Anthropocene.

The third chapter zooms in more narrowly on the relationship between oil and modernity and pays particularly attention to the role that oil played in the unprecedented mobility of the modern world. Stephanie LeMenager coins the term “petromodernity” to describe the entanglement of petroleum and the modern world and described our contemporary world as “living oil” which has shaped notions of work, masculinity, democracy, colonialism, and archaeology. The literal viscosity of oil made it easy to transport and made it essential to the working of aircraft and automobile engines and contributed Chris Witmore’s understanding of oil as a viscous hyperobject as well as Reza Negarestani’s fantastic view of oil as lubricating the world. This introduced a new era of mobility which allowed and sometimes required individuals to move at the increasing speed of capital. This inspired a century of “petrofiction” ranging from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! to the America road novel or Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) as well as a growing interest among archaeologists into mobility, road, roadside features, and even vehicles themselves. Workforce housing in the Bakken represents just one expression of the accelerating world powered by petroleum. At the same time, a desire for stability and fixity continued to influence the shape of domestic life. Inexpensive gasoline fueled the growth of the post-war suburb which embodied this tension by relying on growing road networks around cities while also offering the illusion of the fixed, persistent, security of rural life.

Photography represented another manifestation of the tension between the fixity and mobility. The New Topographics and their successors produced photographs that set the vast timelessness of the western landscape against the marks of human interventions: suburbs, parking lots, roads, and pipelines. The fourth chapter of this book makes the argument that photography sought to capture the dynamism of the modern world by creating a fragmented sense of stability. Photographs produce permanent objects that appear to defy the mobility and contingency of the modern world. This effort to create permanence through the practice of photography relied on strategies of fragmentation. In this way, photography sought to arrest the experience of acceleration that made it more and more difficult to isolate moments in the continuous experience. The speed with which modern technology could transport information, goods, and ourselves over vast distances causing abrupt encounters with discontinuity to punctuate every day life. These experienced influenced modernist writers and thinkers who argued for the disintegration of the human experience and challenged the capacity of narrative to reproduce reality. Nora Goldschmidt has show how the imagist poets — such as T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound — deliberately invoked fragments as a gesture toward the discontinuities and disjunctions of the modern world. Walter Benjamin witness the multiple temporality present in the Parisian Arcades and inspired the work of Shannon Lee Dawdy and Laurent Olivier as they have sought to find new metaphors to make sense of the contemporary. Photographs embody multiple temporality by dint of their contemporaneity and resist reduction to narrative. Michael Shanks’s “photowork” and Hicks’s and Leslie McFadyen’s “photology” emphasize the duration present in the photograph and the temporal instability of the photograph’s contemporaneity. In doing so, they make clear that photographs resist narrative. The final part of this section introduces Byung-Chul Hans’s approach to the fragmentary present not as an opportunity to reconcile fragments into new or counter narratives, but as an opportunity for contemplation and new forms of understanding.

The conclusion recognizes photography as a key tool in documenting the modern world and for understanding the central role that oil and other carbon based fuels both have played in the formation of the contemporary world and will play in defining our increasingly perilous future. Our project used photography — the quintessentially modern instrument for reproducing reality — as a way to document the temporary homes of workers in the oil patch. This introduces a human scale to the expansiveness of petromodernity and anchors our work in fragmented expression of human experience.

Writing Wednesday: Revising with Purpose

I submitted my latest book manuscript on oil, photography, archaeology, and The Bakken when I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. In part, I was hoping some reviews would help me focus a bit (or cut away the cruft from my key points making the book more on point) and tighten up my work. 

As so often happens, the break from the manuscript, the reviewers notes, and some additional reading has led me to make some key revisions. I wrote a bit about what I was planning to do last week. Some of them are subtle, but there are a few that stand out. 

Here are three new paragraphs that I think made my book stronger.

The first paragraph is the first one in the book: 

This book presents photographs from a workforce housing site in the North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch as an archaeology of the contemporary world. These photographs embody a contemporary encounter with an oil boom and the workers who came to this isolated region to drill, frack, move, and consume oil. Despite my efforts, the photographs resisted subordination to a narrative structure and refused to be reduced to evidence. Instead, these images taught me to see the contemporary world as irreducible fragments that endure without resolving into narrative. The rest of this book explains why this matters.

The next two paragraphs come from deep in the manuscript and do some work to integrate Byung-Chul Han into my argument. These are pretty important paragraphs that too a long time to write:

Less influential on archaeology, but perhaps as important, is the work of Byung-Chul Han who argues that the modern world saw the collapse of narrative. Teleology, rhythms, stories of progress, have collapsed under the endless demands of capital. Hillary Orange’s work on “daycentrism” and artificial lighting in the post-medieval Europe demonstrates that even the diurnal rhythm of light and darkness succumbed to the relentless pressures of capital and, in the 20th century, petromodernity (Orange 2018). In the Bakken, boom time both anticipated the bust, but also denied it. Among residents of the oil patch, my colleagues and I recognized this denial and termed it “Bakktimism” (Caraher et al. 2020: 300). Bakktimism represented the optimism that the boom time would continue indefinitely into the future avoiding the cyclical encounter with the bust. At the same time, Bakktimism also allowed for the frenetic pace of boom time to continue unabated into the future. It denied the illusory relief of the bust, which simply marked the relocation of capital to the next boom, and anticipated the future where the boom continues indefinitely. For Han, this hope for an unending boom reveals our incapacity to even imagine narratives any longer much less personalize them. We cannot see a future where labor creates a different world. Instead, the world is just more of the same (even a bust anticipates the next boom). Han, perhaps drawing on Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1936), sees modern time without direction or pattern as dyschronic, fragmented, isolated, and isolating. This leads to our expansive concept of the contemporary because past and the present intermingle indiscriminately as in the Parisian Arcades or on the surface of the ground. There is no direction, rhythm, structure, or plot to give it order.

Here’s the other:

Rather late in my work on this manuscript, I encountered the work of Byung-Chul Han (Ribeiro 2025). Han’s book The Scent of Time (2009/2017) argued that with the demise of narrative we need to find new ways of engaging with fragments. Han, loosely, although not explicitly, following Benjamin, by arguing that the modern world no longer has narratives that create temporal direction. With modernity, the pilgrim whose goal was the transformational impact of the journey gave way to the tourist for whom the journey itself is an inconvenience that delayed the consumption of the destination. As a result, contemporary individuals find themselves working with no goal and time to “whizz” about untethered from any sense of teleology, rhythm, or structure. The greatest risk, for Han, is that our quest to bring order to this senseless whizzing of time and experiences pushes us into the waiting arms of machines. The time of machines divides experience between work and recovery and the absence of any narrative to produce goals reduced humans to ”animal laborians.” The blurring of the division between vehicles designed for “recreation” and those occupied by laborers in man camps is symptomatic of the mechanization of experience. Even time spent not laboring serves merely to provide us more productivity. This productivity does not move forward toward any kind of goal. This evokes Michael Roller’s description of “machanic consumerism” among Pennsylvania coal miners living in 20th century company towns. Both production and consumption served to integrate workers into a system of alienated labor.

The stochastic character of resource booms amplifies Han’s concept of ”dyschronicty” which he uses to describe the whizzing, fragmented, and atomized time. After all, the Bakken boom is merely one of a number of booms that happen episodically around the world and relentless draw on capital and labor until the next boom occurs. Acquiescing to these work rhythms offers no escape because there is no goal and no end. Moreover, any effort to restore narrative in the present is doomed to collapse under the contradictory forces of contemporary existence. This is why the narratives produced from archaeological work, with its industrial organization, fragmentation, and photography, are safely circumscribed in the past. It is just as well. The contemporary — and the archaeology of the contemporary — is incapable of producing narratives because the contemporary resists diachronicity whether in Benjamin’s Parisian Arcades, Roller’s company towns, or Dawdy’s New Orleans.

Writing Wednesday: Revisions to my Book

The last couple of weeks have been focused on revising my archaeology, oil, and photography book. At some point, I’ll need to settle on a proper title, but for now the need for a complete and revised manuscript seems to trump other issues.

Revising doesn’t do much for the old “Writing Wednesday” blog post, but it is vital aspect of my writing process and it seems worth sharing. I’ve tentatively told my press that I will have a complete manuscript ready for copyediting done by May 1. This seems optimistic, but not impossible.

To get this done, I’ve identified three writing tasks.

Prelude

One of the challenges of this book is that it was meant to be an introduction to the photographs. Over time, however, it has become something else. That means, ironically, what was designed to be an introduction now needs an introduction. The manuscript has crept closer to a “minigraph” than anything else, I realize that I need an introduction that both establishes the key theoretical and historical touchstones for my book and also makes clear my work’s contribution.

This means foregrounding the key works that informed my perspective in archaeological photography (Leslie McFadyen and Dan Hicks, Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis, and Michael Shanks), in the study of oil (Stephanie LeMenager, Timothy Mitchell, and Imre Szeman), in archaeology of the contemporary world (Chris Witmore, Alfredo González-Ruibal, and Shannon Dawdy) as well as broader theorists (Timothy Morton, Benjamin, Han, Nora Goldschmidt). All I need to do here is point forward to the book itself. 

The larger task and one that I’ve shied away from is explaining how my work contributes to (gestures wildly) some field (mainly, probably, archaeology of the contemporary world). I can actually hear my old buddy Dimitri Nakassis asking me: “what question is your work answering?” And, of course, imaginary Dimitri is right, and I probably can’t quite answer that. This is mostly because my work is “discursive” to a fault, but I do think I can suggest that my work presents not just a distinct perspective on archaeological photography (on that might be useful) but also gives the reader the photos themselves. 

Revisions

So far, I’ve revised the first three parts of the book (and I’ve not re-written the prelude that I described above), and I’ve saved the most complicated section for last. Section 4 is titled “Photography and Archaeology of the Contemporary World,” and it traces the relationship between photography, archaeology, fragmentation, and narrative. This is where I need to fold Byung-Chul Han into my work more fully. His work will help me not only explain why the contemporary lacks a narrative (and can’t be made to produce or conform to a narrative), but also how the reader should engage with these fragments. One of my reviewers argued that fragments have no meaning. I think Han would disagree (or at least say that if photographs constitute fragments, they are far from meaningless). In fact, I think Han would argue that our inability to make sense of fragments is a product of both the collapse of narrative and our reluctance to dwell in a fragment, to linger, and to find meaning from the fragment itself.

It also directs the reader to the photographs in the book and the archive that they represent. 

Appendix

The biggest lift of my current revisions is writing the appendix that I casually outlined in my post last Wednesday. The appendix will basically outline the basic conclusions from our work in the Bakken. It’ll be around 5000 words, summative and organized across three scales: the landscape, the camp, and the unit. Each section will include select case studies.