Crom­ford Canal. Click for lar­ger image.

It’s easy to take a World Her­it­age Site for gran­ted when it’s on your door­step. I had thought of shoot­ing a short port­fo­lio of Crom­ford for a com­pet­i­tion. They required ten pho­tos. After look­ing into the pro­ject I’ve decided that the com­pet­i­tion isn’t going to hap­pen for me, but a short photo essay on Crom­ford, or pos­sibly the Derwent Val­ley Mills, remains an inter­est­ing idea.

Indus­trial Archae­ology can get short shrift from other archae­olo­gists. Often there’s writ­ten records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archae­ology neces­sary? Mark Hen­shaw, the Archae­ology Dude, makes a good argu­ment that Archae­ology can draw mul­tiple lines of evid­ence to inform his­tor­ies of the past. I wouldn’t dis­count that, and I think his point, Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging, is very import­ant from an Amer­ican per­spect­ive because there Archae­ology is seen as a branch of Anthro­po­logy. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archae­ology paired with His­tory or Clas­sics. So do we really need Indus­trial Archae­olo­gists when there so many Early Mod­ern Historians.

I think another factor Archae­ology brings is spa­tial think­ing. Look­ing at the early days of the pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion of Archae­ology in Bri­tain, one of the fea­tures is an attempt to dis­tin­guish Archae­ology from His­tory by tak­ing on ideas of Geo­graphy. People like OGS Craw­ford were keen to emphas­ise that Archae­ology stud­ied human activ­it­ies in space as well as time. Again, in the UK, when Pro­ces­su­al­ism was tak­ing off in the USA, the Brit­ish aca­dem­ics took inspir­a­tion from it, but also from the ‘New’ Geo­graphy.

The Manager’s House, Cromford.

Apply­ing this prac­tic­ally, it’s easy to say what the pos­i­tion­ing of the Fact­ory Manager’s house, oppos­ite the main gate of Arkwright’s Mill at Crom­ford, means by its loc­a­tion. There are other more subtle ques­tions though. What did draw­ing a second water chan­nel through the Derwent Val­ley mean for land use and access­ib­il­ity? Why was Willers­ley Castle, a grand house that Ark­wright built for him­self, placed where it was? How did it relate to the church he built? If you want to know why a mill owner would want to build a church for his work­ers then, as Mark Hen­shaw says, you have to look at his­tor­ical records too.

You can write a his­tory purely from his­tor­ical records and archives, but if you want to exam­ine the human exper­i­ence, espe­cially of humans that weren’t writ­ing much, then an Indus­trial Archae­ology can yield a richer, more four-dimensional exper­i­ence, than Anthro­po­logy or His­tory alone.