Landscape Archeology

Landscape-oriented archeology is, by all accounts, becoming a ubiquitous line of inquiry in historical archeology. It is, by now, no longer a novel concept to see cultural landscapes as intimately connected to social structures. Thus our work at Van Winkle's Mill sees landscapes as a series of places through which people's lives are threaded help people "give account of their own identity" and are an "arena in which and through which memory, identity, social order and transformation are constructed, played out, re-invented and changed." (Knapp and Ashmore 1999:10; Thomas 2001:173).

The seven years of archeological work conducted in Van Hollow makes it possible to reconstruct at least a portion of the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century landscape of Van Winkle's Mill. Examining this landscape is our first step to analyzing how the material aspects--landscapes and artifacts--of Van Winkle's Mill have engaged cultural memories in the Arkansas Ozarks.

Upon examining a spatial representation of the archeological data, a few things quickly become evident about the configuration of the Van Hollow landscape.

First there seems to be a clearly discernible industrial zone in the northern area of the hollow. Here, in the widest portion of the hollow, were the mills, blacksmith shop, metal scrap areas, lumberyards and mule paddock. This area was, of course, a hub of activity and the locus that made Van Winkle's Mill "a lively place" (Goodspeed 1889:107) that "resembled a fair as people gathered to trade their produce and wares to each other as well as for the sawmill products" (Hicks 1990:20).

Moreover, the mill's industrial features would have been constituent parts of the whole of the industrial enterprise. All would have variously interacted as nodes in a network designed to produce lumber and sell commodities to the public. For instance, the blacksmith shop would be busy casting and repairing mill parts, re-shoeing mules from the paddock, fixing log wagons after delivering their cargo to the mills, and selling goods and services to the general public.

Our work examines this landscape on a regional and site-level in order to understand how it might speak to changes in the social relationships of those who lived and work in the Van Winkle's Mill community. Archeological excavations have alerted us to important shifts before and after the Civil War which might also point to radical changes in the social order of the inhabitants of the hollow and the laborers at the mill. Additionally, our landscape investigations have demonstrated striking similarities between this industrial community in the Arkansas Ozarks and those commonly found on lowland cotton plantations.

Preliminary aspects of our landscape approach can be found in an upcoming article in Historical Archaeology and in portions of Brandon 2004 and Brandon and Davidson 2003.