Michigan Technological University's Industrial Archeology Studies

Did you know you could get a Masters Degree or a Ph.D. in Industrial Archeology? If industry isn't growing in your area and an Industrial Development Degree won't do you any good, consider Industrial Archeology. In all seriousness, this is a valuable resource to economic developers trying to understand and call attention to their area's industrial heritage.

(Photo) Early Ford Motor Company Headquarters Building, early 1900s, Detroit, Michigan. Credit: Industrial Ruins of Detroit Project.

Broadly speaking, Michigan Technological University Industrial Archaeology Program (IAP) is about the recording, study, interpretation, and preservation of the physical remains of industrially-related artifacts, sites, and systems within their cultural and historical contexts.

These remains may be as old as a seventeenth-century bloomery forge, or as recent as an abandoned mid-twentieth-century steel mill. In practice, IA in the US and UK generally focuses on the period of the industrial revolution and later, though there is a strong connection to the study of earlier technologies, particularly in the area of archaeometallurgy.

Industrial Archaeology emerged as a distinct field of study in the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 50s, when historians, preservationists, archaeologists, and engineers became concerned that many of the key relics of Britain's industrial heritage were disappearing. By the 1960s and 70s, the IA movement had spread across the Atlantic to the United States, as well as continental Europe, spawning several journals, and a number of professional associations, including the Society for Industrial Archeology, based at Michigan Technological University.