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The Industrial Archaeology of the Archaeology Industry

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Jonathan W. Gardner
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The Industrial Archaeology of the Archaeology Industry


Jonathan Gardner
Independent Researcher, jonathan.gardner@ucl.ac.uk.

In this paper I investigate the archaeology industry, the commercially driven sector of our
discipline that excavates and surveys sites in advance of development as a part of the wider
industrialized world. Through examination of the multiple elements of commercial
archaeology (Cultural Resource Management - CRM) operations, using the UK heritage
management context as a case study, I examine the industry’s similarities with other sectors
such as mining or manufacturing that are more the traditional focus of industrial archaeology.
I explore the raw materials, processes, labor, tools, and products of archaeological practice. I
also reflect upon the history of the discipline and the traces that archaeologists themselves
leave behind following the completion of their work. I contend that, by consideration of the
commercial archaeology industry in such a way, we can spark new debates and suggest new
avenues of study for industrial archaeology as a whole.

Introduction
This paper is intended as something of a provocation in that it aims to move beyond debates
about “future directions” in industrial archaeology or discussion around what periods or sites
we should study and instead, argues that, regardless of such definitions, the practice of
archaeology itself is a form of industrial activity. I suggest that archaeology like any industry,
has defined raw materials, labor requirements, tools, procedures, and standards, that
ultimately create a series of products and by-products. I do not intend this to mean it is ‘like’
or roughly analogous to industry (for example Adorno’s “Culture Industry” or Hewison’s
“Heritage Industry”)1 but rather to suggest that to better understand our practice we should
think about commercial archaeology/CRM (commercial archaeology hereafter) as a form of
genuine industrial activity.

The implications of this argument are that if we are an industry and our field is a part and
product of the Industrial Revolution(s), the discipline itself can be subject to archaeological
research using the techniques, methodologies, and theory used by the sub-field of industrial
archaeology, including archival research, survey, lab-based analyses, and indeed,
excavation.2 This is not necessarily to advocate for the excavation of the workplaces of
commercial excavation companies (though perhaps in the future more such work will take
place3), but rather to encourage the exploration of how the history of archaeology has

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unfolded as part of the Industrial Revolution and industrialization. From the very materials
and components of our tools to our methods, bureaucracy, and labor practices, archaeology is
inherently linked to industrial systems of production and development.

My view may seem controversial if we bear in mind the warnings of Shanks and McGuire
over twenty years ago, who argued that archaeology risked becoming a production line
characterized by the alienation of its workforce and who suggested that it should return to its
“craft” origins.4 By using the word “industry,” however, I do not seek to limit or reduce to
unskilled or simplistic mass production what archaeologists do. Rather, I aim for a deeper
engagement with the context of our practice within wider society and its large-scale
applications (i.e., through tens-of-thousands of development-driven archaeological projects
each year across the world) and as shaping public understandings of the past –– something
that industrial archaeological studies have not always successfully achieved to date.5

Following Eleanor Conlin Casella, an obvious means to approach the study of the
archaeology industry is to consider its place and operation within common industrial domains
of production, distribution, and consumption.6 For example, what products does the industry
“produce” and which does it rely upon to operate? How are those products distributed and
ultimately consumed and/or discarded? At all stages, what are the material traces of this
series of interrelated processes and who or what is involved in each stage? We must also ask
how this material-centric emphasis relates to lived experience: what is it like to be an
archaeologist in the commercial sector or a consumer of its products?

In this paper I cannot fully explore all such avenues of investigation but will show why I
believe considering the practice of archaeology as an industry is important for the study of
industry more broadly. As Moshenska notes in his discussion of reverse engineering and
archaeology, the study of the relationships between technology and industrial processes, and
humans reveals the complexities and contradictions of industrialization and shows that, “the
supposedly dehumanizing technologies of mass production were never as smoothly
mechanized as they appeared, and that the human factor remain[s] … a key component in
even the most advanced technological processes.”7

Moshenska’s argument ties in more broadly with our own everyday experiences of industry.
Torgeir Bangstad, for example, notes that there is a “peculiar double role of industrial
heritage [which] involves celebration of the industrial past and ways of overcoming the
industrial past through preservation.”8 That is, in preserving the industrial past as
monumental artefacts or cataloguing its material culture exhaustively, we run the risk of
distancing or decoupling that very material from lived experience. I would further argue that
this distancing also contributes to the misleading assertion that in much of Europe and North
America we live in a post-industrial era. As others have noted in debates around what the
purpose of “contemporary past” archaeology should be, I believe we should not be trying to

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artificially “make the familiar unfamiliar” or to stand apart from that which we study and
therefore, I suggest that reflecting upon our own industriousness as archaeologists is
valuable.9

This paper draws upon my own experiences working in commercial archaeology in the UK
(specifically London and the south east of England) for several commercial companies over
the last decade or so, as well as research undertaken as part of my doctoral thesis.10 Given the
problem of inevitable biases involved in recalling one’s own experiences as a form of
research, this method is framed where possible with reference to other sources of evidence
related to commercial archaeology such as market reports and others’ experiences.

Locating the archaeology industry


When talking about the archaeology industry, I mean archaeological activities carried out in
relation to ongoing development and/or profit-making purposes, or at least, a practice that
results from other industrial activities such as construction, led either by the private sector or
state actors. Sometimes misleadingly labelled “rescue” archaeology (which risks ignoring its
close involvement within planning control and government policy), these infrequently
acknowledged “missing masses” are often referred to, in the UK at least, as the “archaeology
sector” as distinct from archaeological teaching and research in higher education or display at
museums and heritage sites.

Commercial archaeology could be said to resemble a service industry, but I would suggest
this ignores its inherently extractive and productive nature (i.e., it combines the utilization of
depletable raw materials with a distinct form of production, besides simply servicing the
development industry). In terms of other support for the sector being considered as industrial,
we might also look to the huge scale of its operations.

Firstly, commercial archaeology is a multimillion-dollar enterprise. In the UK, for example,


archaeological companies had a mean turnover of £2.7 million (c. US$4 million) each in FY
2015-16, employing nearly 6,000 people.11 Though exact figures are hard to come by due to
commercial confidentiality, the companies that make up the UK industry (a mixture of both
profit-making and non-profit organizations) investigate several thousand sites per year and
work on a wide variety of construction projects (residential development being the most
common). Increasingly, they are expected to adhere to a common set of regulations and
policies set by Chartered Institute for Archaeologists in return for professional
accreditation.12 The number of unionized workers grows larger each year and engages in
collective bargaining mainly through the Prospect trade union.13 All these traits therefore
clearly resemble the activities and practices of other industrial sectors.

James Symonds and others have argued that service industries (i.e., those which do not

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directly produce anything, also known as “tertiary industries”) are as a valid a subject for
industrial archaeology to examine as those that are involved in the extraction of raw
materials, or sites, and methods of mass production.14 We have recently seen industrial
archaeology conducted on the sites of casinos and football grounds and, more artefactually
based, expanding into non-traditional areas such as modern consumer electronics.15 If
industrial archaeology is to thrive in the twenty-first century, as many have come to
recognize, it must consider a wider variety of topics than it has done before –– and crucially,
also investigate the wider social context of those industries and their continued impact on our
lives today.16

Whether one considers commercial archaeology as a service industry or (as I do) one more
primarily based in extraction and production (as I explain below), it is today a mature sector
which sees the material remnants of the past extracted and analyzed on a truly industrial
scale. This work is undertaken by skilled operatives, using modern tools and techniques and a
common set of standards, to produce not only new knowledge about the past but also, by
satisfying planning and legislative requirements, enabling development to take place (e.g.,
construction, infrastructure development, mineral extraction). Without this product of
commercial archaeological labor, development projects in the UK and in many other
countries could not proceed under current legislation.

Such protective legislation now found in nations across the world—mainly as a result of a
booming interest in heritage since the 1970s—frequently requires a rigorous analysis of what
lies below the ground (or of standing historic buildings, maritime wrecks, and so on). Such
investigation produces reports and publications, which when approved, enable a developer to
gain permission at local and/or national government levels to begin construction. Thus, as I
discuss further below, those reports are a key factor in facilitating economic growth in
modern (post)industrial economies

Clearly, if commercial archaeology no longer was to take place in advance of development,


little would change in the wider industrial world. As it currently stands in many nation states
however, development is effectively precluded from taking place in many areas without
archaeological assessment. This has come about because of the requirements of national
historic preservation instruments such as the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in
England (and similar legislation in the UK’s other three constituent countries) or, to a lesser
degree, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and a myriad of other and state-level
preservation acts in the U.S.

Moves in the UK have been made to weaken historic preservation law where it is perceived
as holding back development but to date these have not been successful.17 Because
governments across the world for a variety of reasons –– from tourism to promoting national
identity –– increasingly value heritage resources, it seems unlikely that such requirements for

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archaeological investigation in advance of development will be abolished any time soon.


Thus, though we cannot argue archaeology is as integral to our lives as manufacturing or
transport, it is nonetheless deeply connected to other sectors of the economy and worthy of
investigation.

Previous work
Lena Mortensen’s important exploration of the “archaeology industry” of Copán in Honduras
inspired this paper.18 Mortensen argued that this world-famous reconstructed Maya site,
which draws tens of thousands of visitors every year, relies on a series of specialized
occupations from tour-guides to stone masons that, as labor, produce Mayan archaeology and
distribute it for consumption to both academic and tourist markets. Her identification of such
archaeological practice as an industry, with commensurate organization, specialization, and
provision of a product to an end consumer is a significant gesture. She notes that the industry
at archaeological sites is, like any other, linked to global flows of capital, resources, and
labor.19 Mortensen draws attention to the fact that we cannot separate archaeology as a
practice, either in academic or commercial guises, as somehow outside of the modern late-
capitalist economy.

Besides Mortensen’s work –– other than detailed studies of the working conditions of
commercial archaeologists in the UK –– only Hutchings and La Salle’s “Archaeology as
Disaster Capitalism” examines archaeology as a global economic activity in its own right,
though not specifically considering the industrial implications of this label per se.20 Much of
their work considers how North American commercial archaeology can be seen as profiting
from the destruction of indigenous heritage landscapes to facilitate capitalistic development.
Whilst such concerns are extremely important, clearly in an environment like the UK the
ethical concerns of commercial practice here are somewhat different given that it takes place
in a non-settler state context.

Thus, while recognizing the importance of such contributions, I wish to broaden the scope of
discussion to consider archaeology as an economic activity in a more immediate, material
sense. I begin with a consideration of the “production line” of commercial archaeology

The process (or, the production line)


The vast majority of archaeological work in the UK, Europe, and North America takes place
in a development-led context, meaning that archaeological labor is inherently tied to the
construction industry (or in some cases, the mining industry). Archaeological work therefore
often has to take place on construction sites or in quarries, and is predicated on having trained
archaeologists on site to remove archaeological remains as quickly as possible while
maintaining high professional standards. In the UK, for example, the relationship between
archaeological contractors and those who fund the work –– property developers or,

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occasionally, the state –– is formulaic and follows government planning legislation. It is fair
to say that such commercial archaeology companies see themselves as part of a defined
sector, inextricable from the planning process and the construction industry, whose ultimate
products, besides knowledge about the past, is facilitating the construction of new buildings
and infrastructure or allowing mineral extraction to proceed (figure 1). Though clearly
commercial archaeology practices have some similarities in Europe and North America, here
I use the UK example to illustrate the production line element of the industry, given that this
is the system and the country with which I am most familiar.

In the UK the vast majority of development-led


archaeological work operates on the principle that
the “polluter pays”, whereby a developer who
wishes to alter the landscape in some way, either
for construction or some other potentially
destructive use, is required, under planning
legislation, to pay for appropriate archaeological
work in order to gain planning permissions for their
development to proceed.21 The planning system in
the UK (which varies slightly between its four
constituent nations) generally devolves to local
authorities such as County Councils in England or
individual metropolitan districts. Such local
authorities’ Planning (or ‘County’) Archaeologists
specify the level of archaeological research required
in advance of development, and then oversee the
monitoring of archaeological works carried out by
contractors.

Figure 1. Urban Archaeology in This system, in place informally since the mid-
London. Photograph by the author. 1980s and then as government policy from 1991,
has led to the excavations of tens-of-thousands of sites across the UK and continues to drive
(and fund) the vast majority of research into the national archaeological resource.22

The UK system operates as follows (assuming a private development rather than a


government-led construction project). First, a developer proposing a new project must submit
a planning application detailing the scheme to the local authority (e.g. a city, county, or
borough planning department). In general, the local authority will assess whether the
development will have an impact on archaeological resources. If the proposed development is
determined likely to impact on archaeological remains, the authority will specify a planning
condition mandating some level of archaeological works to mitigate damage. This can vary
from desk-based assessment to ensure no known resources of archaeological interest are in

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proximity, to a variety of levels of physical intervention, with the most dramatic form being
full-scale excavation.23

The developer, as the funder of such mitigation, has the right to put the works specified by
the local authority “out to tender” (i.e., invite archaeological companies to submit competing
bids for the work) or simply to choose an archaeological sub-contractor without a bidding
process.24 Thus, commercial archaeology companies are frequently involved in an economic
decision-making process as with any other industrial producer: they must submit bids they
think are likely to be accepted for the work specified. This is a difficult process of estimation,
as only rarely can one be entirely sure of what efforts and resources will be required before a
site is studied or excavated.

After the acceptance of a bid, a project proceeds according to set standards (e.g., in England,
Historic England’s Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment
[MoRPHE]) specifying the responsibilities of archaeological contractors and, along with the
relevant national planning guidance, ensuring that the results of any archaeological works are
properly disseminated.25 The project then takes place depending on what is specified, taking
anything from half a working day (for a small desk-based assessment) to several years for
large excavations and “post-ex” analyses. For the conclusion of on-site activities like
excavation to take place, the Planning Archaeologist must sign off on the work to enable
development to commence which means they agree that the appropriate level of
archaeological mitigation has been completed to standard. The project is then written up,
usually as an unpublished report for the developer and Planning Archaeologist (these reports
are generally known as “grey literature”), and a project’s finds, samples, and/or records are,
following analysis, archived in local authority repositories or discarded if they are no longer
required.

If a site is of particular significance or it is one of several in a set area (generally of the same
period) funding may be sought for full publication of an academic monograph and, more
rarely, a popular style book or pamphlet.26

This summary has presented an example of the process of the archaeology industry in one
country, which demonstrates the complexity and regularization of this activity, much like any
other sector and admittedly seems quite far removed from the craft of archaeology.27 Before
considering this further, I now turn to the role of labor in this process.

Labor and laboring


Any consideration of the archaeological industry must address the full range of elements
involved in practicing commercial archaeology: its labor requirements, its required skills and
procedures, how the work changes our bodies, and how our labor transforms the materials of

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the past into a final product or by-products.

Commercial archaeology relies upon fieldwork to turn a profit and though a wide range of
roles are active in the profession (figure 2), here I want to focus particularly on site staff who
are directly involved in handling the raw materials of archaeology either through excavation,
survey, or monitoring of sites to illustrate the type of labor that takes place “at the coalface”
as it were.

While Yarrow notes that “archaeology makes archaeologists,” he also contends that
“archaeologists make archaeology” and that, “in the process of excavation people embody the
discipline, regulating their bodily actions by employing systems and methods and through
this, regulating the records and data that result.”28 This creation of a product, interpretations
concerning “the past,” relies upon the labor of archaeologists in combination with the raw
material (the remnants of previous eras), the tools and systems we employ in the excavation,
and the recording and analyses we conduct. Thus, much like a traditional industry,
archaeologists follow set stages and procedures, but these also are affected by the stuff we
find and the affordances of the tools we use.

I shall discuss the particulars of


some of these tools shortly but here
want to reflect further on the
process of excavation itself. How is
the experience of excavating an
archaeological feature (e.g., an
infilled ditch or quarry pit)
especially different from someone,
say, conducting small-scale
artisanal mining? What connects
my own labor to a wider industry?
Laboring in the exertion of
excavating an archaeological
feature or deposit requires Figure 2. The author at the base of a deep urban
trench with Roman archaeology, some years ago.
something akin to the craft Shanks
Photo by R. Hartle. Used with permission.
and McGuire relate, and at a more
physical level requires experience of using tools such as shovels or mattocks to remove large
amounts of material –– hence, the development of technique, not to mention muscle tone! 29

These excavation skills have a value and, indeed, such skills are sold at a profit, contributing
to new knowledge of the past and to the physical removal of its traces to aid economic
development through construction. The processes of excavation rely on knowledge not only
of what archaeological features look like (mainly gained through previous experience –– and

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to a lesser extent in the university classroom) but also on a whole variety of engagements
with what we take for granted: the archaeological materials of dirt and artefacts along with
tools and interaction with superiors and external staff like planning archaeologists. All of
these seemingly disparate elements come to together with archaeologists’ labor to recover
just a small amount of information about the past which then feeds into a larger production
line, showing how connected any archaeological process is with the wider context in which it
occurs. Much more could be discussed regarding the wider significance of archaeological
laboring in terms of how archaeologists’ work is utilized within wider capitalistic processes
(operatives, for example, being often alienated from their labor’s ultimate outputs of final
interpretations and remaining unnamed in site reports). Significant issues pertaining to
gender, age, and class clearly also accompany work in commercial archaeology. However,
for reasons of space, I now want to consider some of the other elements in the archaeological
process in greater detail: our tools and then the raw materials we extract.

Tools
In the archaeology industry, whether in survey or in excavation, we rely heavily on
industrially manufactured products ranging from the low-tech and non-specialized (e.g.,
injection-molded plastic buckets, 6H pencils, masonry string-lines) to an intermediate
category of precision-made but nonetheless cheap and near-disposable tools (4-in. pointing
trowels, hand-tapes, ball-point pens) to machinery and vehicles (360˚ tracked excavators,
dump trucks, pick-ups, power-augers) and complex and expensive recording equipment
(DGPS surveying equipment, drones, lidar, digital cameras). Each of these, no matter how
simple or complex, cheap or costly, is
manufactured somewhere by someone (or
increasingly, something) and is reliant on chains
of material extraction, processing, labor, and
distribution (not to mention research and
development, marketing, and advertising). One
might respond to such a statement by noting that
any profession –– or, indeed, any domestic
situation across the world –– also uses such a
subset of tools and equipment. Of course, this
would be entirely correct. However, I would
suggest that archaeologists are at times of guilty
of seeing these tools simply as extensions of their
own bodies or of little consequence for how we Figure 3. A 24-tonne tracked
do archaeology. Clearly, there are important excavating machine and Moxy dump
reasons for this: the 4-in. trowel presents a truck on site. Photograph by the
author.
limited yet highly intuitive and useful number of
affordances for example, and even a 24-ton machine, equipped with a flat-bladed ditching

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bucket with a skillful driver (under the direction of an experienced archaeologist) can be an
incredibly precise tool for excavating sites (figure 3). It is rare that these and our other tools
of choice are subject to anything like the kind of critical scrutiny that we apply to the
materials that we actually excavate.

To return to the trowel, we might see an exception to our usual disregard for tools. Others
have written about the trowel’s key place in archaeology’s mythos, notably Kent Flannery’s
“Golden Marshalltown,” and in a more material-focused manner, Lemke’s and Bateman’s
photo essay on the WHS trowel (the industry-standard for UK archaeology companies, much
like Marshalltown is in the U.S.).30 This near-fetishization of the trowel is often connected to
our own identity as archaeologists.31 In Kent Flannery’s famous comical account of a meeting
of a motley selection of archaeologists on a long plane journey, the old timer in his story, a
grizzled digger, “tanned and weather beaten,” discusses how he has lost his academic
position because he still believes in something called “culture.” He informs Flannery that, as
a leaving present, his colleagues snuck into his office and stole his first Marshalltown and
“had that sucker plated in 24-karat gold” and though expressing remorse at its mutilation,
nonetheless donates it to the author to give to “a kid who still believes in culture, and in hard
work, and in the history of humanity; a kid who's in the field because he or she loves it, and
not because they want to be famous; a kid who'd never fatten up on somebody else's data, or
cut down a colleague just to get ahead; a kid who knows the literature, and respects the
generations who went before.”32 Such tales turn the trowel into a symbolic totem, and
acknowledged its role as the key artefact in archaeological practice.33

What needs to be discussed, however, is the industrial nature of such tools and how the
trowel itself is disregarded as a material, industrial thing. At a more theoretical level, we
might also ask how such tools make us dependent upon them and the affordances they offer
us.34

The WHS trowel provides an illustrative example of archaeology’s connection to industry in


the very grip of our hands. Its origins lie in Sheffield, the northern English city at the heart of
the Industrial Revolution and famous since the eighteenth century for its steel making and
particularly edge tools and cutlery trades.35 The WHS moniker derives from the original
company name of “William Hunt & Sons”(or “Work Hard or Starve,” according to some)
which emerged in the 1780s as a manufacturer of edge tools and in 1942 merging with Nash
Tyzack, another tool manufacturer, before further mergers ultimately resulted in the global
Spear & Jackson Group, still based in Sheffield. The trowels themselves “are roll-forged in
Sheffield from one solid piece of metal, a skilled job and one which is little changed since it
first began so many years ago. Despite technological advances, it is still very much a hand-
crafted product with heavy reliance on the skill of the operator to roll it correctly.”36

The tools and materials we use can also be considered from another angle: their disuse and

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disposal. Generally commercial archaeology leaves little behind on its sites—we collect our
finds, records, and tools, and the site huts and vehicles are off-hired. Nonetheless, as with any
real archaeological deposit, some traces of our presence linger which will potentially help
future archaeologists to identify our archaeological presence.

Broken tools might, for example, be left behind. On a construction site close to the River
Thames in London’s financial district being developed in 2008, new piles were being driven
by contractors using an enormous piling rig. Though monitoring archaeologists watched the
piling, this area of the site was not archaeologically excavated for the simple reason that
nearly thirty years previously our predecessors in the Museum of London’s Department of
Urban Archaeology had beaten them to it. Nonetheless the spoils from the piling rig were
briefly scanned for any finds that may have been missed in 1981, and thus, somewhat
remarkably, beneath the now demolished foundations of the 1980s structure, a broken WHS
trowel emerged. This trowel bore the marks of the manufacturer stamped into it and its
wooden handle was as well-preserved in the waterlogged deposits as the 800 year old
medieval revetments nearby.37

An even more spectacular example of a lost or discarded archaeological tool was found
nearby in 2012 on another financial district site; the so-called “Grimes Pickaxe’. Re-
excavating the site of the famous Roman Temple of
Mithras first dug by Prof. W.F. Grimes in 1954 in
advance of the construction of Bloomberg’s new
European headquarters, Museum of London Archaeology
staff unearthed a pickaxe buried in the wet sediments
(figure 4), almost certainly belonging to a member of the
crew that removed the Temple structure nearly sixty years
previously.38

Like any industrial process, evidence of archaeological


work can be documented by such traces in conjunction
with other sources such as photographs and oral history.
Such tools, embracing Edgeworth’s suggestions for an
“archaeology of the nano scale” or at least Deetz’s small
(and indeed forgotten) scale, also bear material witness to
our practices.39

Trowels, for example (figure 5), could be subject to


further study such as use-wear analysis, microscopy of the
soil embedded in their materials or even isotopic analysis Figure 4. Grimes’ Pickaxe upon
of the wooden handle to determine where its timber was discovery. Photograph courtesy
felled. We could also consider such trowels as agents that of S. Watson/MOLA.

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have a certain level of impact on how a given archaeologist removes the earth and indeed
each defect or modification further feeds into this.40 I would suggest that trowels especially
embody both our reliance on the products of industrial modernity and the sense of industrial
labor inherent in archaeology. Our mass removal of past materials leaves a trace not only as
records or finds but also on the very tools we use.

Raw materials
Following the common idea of the archaeological resource to its extreme conclusion,41 the
primary raw material that feeds commercial archaeology’s production processes are the
material remnants of past human activity and the matrix within which these reside:
archaeological strata and its varied contents which we label and interpret as artefacts,
environmental remains, and so forth.

This material removal is usually understood to be at the core of what archaeologists do.
Though I am uneasy about labelling archaeology as just a resource to be mined like oil or
copper, it is nonetheless a useful term when thinking about the discipline as an industry.

This past resource is however only part of the material picture. We are selective about what
we choose to extract and process. We might think of the average archaeological layer –– a
yard surface, for example –– as of little interest in its base material makeup (e.g., a sandy
gravel). Its constituent finds, environmental residues, and certain qualities (such as its

Figure 5. A two-year-old WHS trowel (top) and a brand new one (bottom). Photograph by
the author.

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dimensions, inclusions, and color) are what we study, ascribing importance, date, or function
to the feature accordingly. Like a mining process (with subsequent processes of purification
and refinement), archaeological work is not simply based on the labor of a single human
individual but involves a network of interactions between different materials, individuals,
procedures, and tools.

This past matter, as a raw material, is worthless to us unless we understand its value and what
it affords us. Tens-of-thousands of years ago when people first found petroleum leaching out
of the ground presumably they could have seen it simply as a curious but ultimately useless
substance, until later when they discovered that it was not only a very common material, but
its derivatives could be used as an adhesive, and much later, as an alternative to burning
wood, coal, or whale oil.42 Similarly, we might think of early reactions to archaeological
finds we now take for granted as being anthropogenic objects. For example, and most
famously, flint tools such as hand axes were widely believed until the late eighteenth century
in many places in Europe to be naturally formed thunderstones that simply fell from the sky
during lighting storms. Only later were they recognized as human-made tools.43

Thus we must remember that what becomes valued as a resource is not necessarily obvious or
inevitable. This again gives us pause to reflect on how archaeology, or indeed any industry,
operates and came into being in the first place. My description of past remnants as raw
material is subjective in that the developer of a project which employs an archaeological
company may see archaeological material as a simple contaminant, like asbestos or heavy
metals, that must be removed as cheaply and quickly as possible.44 This has implications for
industrial archaeology because we must be careful about assuming how materials or
processes are valued and used by different groups at different times. This realization forces
archaeologists to recognize that their practice as an industry can produce unexpected
consequences beyond simply offering new knowledge of the past.

Products and by-products


Unlike a conventional industry, it is hard to define archaeology’s finished or refined products
because our interpretations concerning the past are subject to frequent revisions. We can
nonetheless identify two categories of outputs in commercial archaeology.

The first category are those outputs we produce intentionally. Primarily, these are the
interpretations of the past we make which are then distributed in reports based on the
identification, extraction, and analysis of archaeological ‘raw materials’. Particularly in the
commercial sector, such reports also represent the final product in the archaeological
mitigation process that enables planning permission for development projects. Though
thousands of these reports are produced in the UK each year, I would suggest that, to
developers, the contents of such reports’ are less important than the mere fact of their

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existence, as their production demonstrates that they have successfully fulfilled their planning
obligations and that their development can proceed without further archaeological work.

Clearly, archaeologists have a conflicting set of priorities in what Philip Duke describes as
“the inevitable nexus between capitalist practice and contemporary archaeology.”45 Our
professional desire to find out more about the past must contend with the need to make a
profit and to respond to the needs of developers. Cornelius Holtorf notes that “ancient sites
and objects are not the origin but the product of cultural appreciation of the past.”46 Such a
product has both intellectual and financial value. Cumberbatch writes: “Historical knowledge
is not the past-as-it-existed, an intransitive object of objective knowledge, and nor, most
emphatically, is it a fiction. Rather, it is a potent commodity in its own right, rich in
capacities all of which may be deployed, manipulated and used by human subjects.”47

The material we recover during archaeological work is not ‘the past’ itself waiting to be
discovered. Rather an understanding of previous eras can only be produced in the present,
through an interaction between the material itself (a physical trace of something that
happened in an earlier time—say, a potsherd) and the context in which it was found,
interpreted, and re-used in the present. Edgeworth suggests excavation allows ‘artefacts and
structures from other times and places break out into the open, suddenly or gradually taking
form for the first time in our cultural universe.”48

This product, what we construct as knowledge of the past, is subjectively understood and not
always to everyone’s taste. Archaeologists follow a particularly niche means of producing
this knowledge, making interpretations through material culture directly, whereas historians,
for example, utilize historical texts or archives to draw other conclusions, while still others
base their interpretations of the past on tradition, religion, or folklore and may not agree with
archaeological interpretations.

Thus, as an end product, interpretations about the past can be nebulous, readily modified and
repackaged as required. This is not to say that archaeologists should not be in the business of
facilitating construction projects but as an industry our relationship to the past is never
straightforwardly academic; its resources are ultimately involved in economic development.49

In addition to archaeology’s intentional products (knowledge of the past and facilitation of


development), the archaeology industry also generates a number of by-products. Some of
them are recognized as such; others go unacknowledged. For example, on any given
excavation, hundreds or thousands of artefacts are washed, analyzed, and archived, alongside
large numbers of geoarchaeological and environmental samples, all of which must also be
processed (most to destruction in the process). Excavations also produce a further by-product
(or at least an intermediate product) in the form of vast paper digital and artefactual archives.
An average multi-month excavation in the UK generates hundreds of A4 pro-forma recording

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sheets for deposits and cuts, timber, masonry, coffins, skeletons and environmental samples.
All of these are completed by hand and later digitized, along with scaled section/elevation
drawings and plans of archaeological features. This is complemented by thousands of digital
images and CAD files generated from surveys. This, the site archive, is used for the final
report and is then archived itself for future researchers. The archive, then, ends up standing in
for the site as raw data,50 with the likes of archaeological drawings and plans themselves
“rapidly becom[ing] recognizable artifacts of the archaeological process”51—a trace of the
industrial process of archaeological extraction.

While all this is intentionally created to facilitate


new knowledge of the past and permission for a
development project to go forward, it ultimately
becomes a subsidiary by-product once a project is
complete. This vast material and increasingly
digital remainder is so large that it has, in fact,
created a crisis in storage capacity. This is an
immediately obvious trace of the archaeology
industry: the sum of all such products, languishing
in archives rarely studied or looked at once
accessioned.52 Such an archive in some future
archaeology scenario, indeed, may be found to be
evidence of the archaeology industry and how it
dealt with the past in a peculiarly regularized way.

Another by-product of our practice, perhaps the


least remarked upon, are the vast quantities of
earth and rubble generated when excavating sites.
Whether this is extracted by hand or machine, this
matrix that contained the ‘real’ archaeology is a
rapidly discarded material whose accidental
qualities (consistency, color, and geological
Figure 6. A large spoil heap generated composition) are briefly recorded before disposal.
by archaeological stripping (with Moxy
“What happens to our spoil heaps?” is a question
dump truck for scale). Photograph by
the author. we rarely ask, but may be worthy of further
investigation53

Normally once the recording of deposits are complete and artifacts removed, archaeology-
bearing deposits are either disposed of to landfill sites in a procession of large trucks or
reused in situ as landscaping (figure 6). Archaeological finds almost certainly remain present
within this material (sieving rarely occurs in UK archaeology) along with the traces of our
work on site: illicitly thrown rubbish like plastic cups, broken tools like pencils, errant finds,

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bags, or labels. Thus, even this by-product will exhibit traces of our industry to any future
archaeologist, though it will be an admittedly jumbled collection.

Finally, even the artefactual materials we excavate are increasingly being reused in new
developments, acting as traces of our practices. For example, as part of its sustainability
program, the 2012 Olympics used materials from archaeological excavations in the design of
its main site in Stratford, east London. Many hundred granite setts and curbstones now
pepper the parkland, many taken from a single excavation in the north of the park (figure 7),
and are reused in paths and stepping stones. Such reuse is rarely something archaeologists
plan for themselves, but in such instances, it can be an unexpected consequence of our
industry.

Figure 7. Reused granite setts from excavation of Victorian


deposits in the London 2012 Olympic Park, Stratford.
Photograph by the author.

Conclusion
This paper has attempted to show that archaeology can be considered an industry in its own
right and that it is inexorably connected with industrial processes and products as well as the
history of industrialization itself. The archaeology industry is ultimately riven by two
conflicting needs. On the one hand it operates to produce new knowledge of the past using
the material traces of previous eras in the course of development projects. In the process, it
relies heavily on the products and processes of the industrial world from high-tech survey
gear to urban planning legislation. On the other hand, it must also facilitate economic growth,

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removing the traces of the past (in effect destroying them) to enable said development to
occur. This paradox that our practice is a one-way street—“archaeology is destruction”—is
well known across the discipline but the fact that the majority of its field projects occur in
development-led projects seems to have been little remarked upon. This paper has therefore
tried to explore this duality through examining the commercial archaeology sector’s
industrial-scale operations and has shown how its various elements can productively be
studied from the standpoint of industrial archaeology.

Whether such study takes place in the future is uncertain as the range of archaeological work
continues to expand. But regardless I would suggest that industrial archaeologists must
recognize that we are also part of the industrial world we investigate. If we are to better
understand the lived-experience of past industries at all scales, it would be desirable for us to
reflect on our practices of surveying and excavation, on issues like the origins and life-
histories of the tools we use, and on our approaches toward the materials we excavate. Such
an approach to industrial archaeology does not see industrial remains as some abstract
material category disconnected from the present, but instead sees them as a crucial part of
human existence. Such an approach follows Mary Beaudry’s call to recognize that industry is
not “not solely a thing of the past” and that our civilization is anything but post-industrial,
particularly given our reliance on the products of industry in our daily lives.54

Each category I have considered, from labor to tools, raw materials to finished products, is
capable of being studied in much greater depth, and the current discussion represents a brief
overview of what could be a significant area for future research. I hope this paper may offer a
starting point for such work and encourage all archaeologists to further reflect on their own
relationship to industrialization, from the material they examine, to the tools and processes
they rely upon every day in the field, lab, or archive, and thus to consider what their own
place is within the archaeology industry.

1 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London and

New York: Routledge, 1991); Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a

Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987).

2 Obviously, this call for greater examination of archaeological practices is not new and is

especially indebted to Hodder’s arguments about “reflexive archaeology”: Ian

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Hodder, “‘Always Momentary, Fluid and Flexible’: Towards a Reflexive Excavation

Methodology,” Antiquity 71, no. 273 (1997): 691–700,

doi:10.1017/S0003598X00085410.

3 Others have indeed already successfully excavated a vehicle operated by an archaeological

company. See Greg Bailey, Cassie Newland, Anna Nilsson, and John Schofield,

“Transit, Transition: Excavating J641 VUJ,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19,

no. 1 (2009): 1–28, doi:10.1017/S0959774309000018.

4 Michael Shanks and Randall H. McGuire, “The Craft of Archaeology,” American Antiquity

61, no. 1 (1996): 75–88.

5 Noted by Peter Neaverson and Marilyn Palmer, Industrial Archaeology: Principles and

Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 4–5.

6 Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds, “Introduction,” in Industrial Archaeology:

Future Directions, ed. Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds (New York:

Springer, 2002), xi–xiii.

7 Gabriel Moshenska, “Reverse Engineering and the Archaeology of the Modern World,”

Forum Kritische Archäologie 5 (2016): 18, doi:10.6105/journal.fka.2016.5.2.

8 Torgeir R. Bangstad, “Industrial Heritage and the Ideal of Presence,” in Ruin Memories

Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, ed. Bjørnar Olsen and

Þóra Pétursdóttir (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 95.

9 Notably, I refer to the argument for a presentist “archaeology-as-surface-survey.” See

Rodney Harrison, “Surface Assemblages. Towards an Archaeology in and of the

Present,” Archaeological Dialogues 18, no. 2 (2011): 141–61.

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10 Jonathan Gardner, “The Archaeology and Heritage of Mega Events in London, 1851–

2012,” PhD diss., Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2017.

11 Kenneth Aitchison, Archaeological Market Survey 2016 (Landward Research Ltd., 2016),

1–2,

http://www.famearchaeology.co.uk/download/Market%20Research/State%20of%20th

e%20Market%20Surveys/Archaeological-Market-Survey-2016.pdf.

12 “CIfA Regulations, Standards and Guidelines,” (n.d.),

http://www.archaeologists.net/codes/cifa.

13 “Prospect Archaeologists,” 2020, https://members.prospect.org.uk/your-

prospect/branch/181/.

14 James Symonds, “Experiencing Industry: Beyond Machines and the History of

Technology,” pp. 33-57, and Martin Hall, “The Industrial Archaeology of

Entertainment,” pp. 261–278, in Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions, ed.

Eleanor Conlin Casella and James Symonds (New York: Springer, 2005).

15 See, e.g., Hall, “The Industrial Archaeology of Entertainment” (see n. 14); Rick Peterson,

“Excavations and the Afterlife of a Professional Football Stadium, Peel Park,

Accrington, Lancashire: Towards an Archaeology of Football,” World Archaeology

44, no. 2 (2012): 263–79; Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, “The Material

Cellphone,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World,

ed. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013), 699–712.

16 Mary Beaudry, “Concluding Comments: Revolutionizing Industrial Archaeology?,” in

Casella and Symonds, 302 (see n. 14); David Cranstone, “The Archaeology of

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Industrialization –– New Directions,” in The Archaeology of Industrialization. Papers

given at the Archaeology of Industrialization Conference, October 1999, ed. David

Baker and David Cranstone (Leeds, UK: Maney, 2004), 316–318.

17 See, e.g., Maev Kennedy, “Archaeologists Furious over Councilor’s “Bunny Huggers’

Jibe,” The Guardian, June 27, 2011,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jun/27/archaeologists-furious-bunny-

huggers.

18 Lena Mortensen, “Producing Copan in the Archaeology Industry,” in Ethnographies and

Archaeologies: Iterations of the Past, ed. Julie Hollowell and Lena Mortensen

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 178–198.

19 Ibid., 180.

20 Paul Everill, The Invisible Diggers: A Study of British Commercial Archaeology, Second

Edition (Oxford and Oakville, CT.: Oxbow Books, 2012); Richard Hutchings and

Marina La Salle, “Archaeology as Disaster Capitalism,” International Journal of

Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015), 699–720.

21 See Joe Flatman and Dominic Perring, “The National Planning Policy Framework and

Archaeology: A Discussion,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 22 (2013): 4–

10, doi:10.5334/pia.390.

22 See, e.g., Historic England, “Building the Future, Transforming Our Past: Celebrating

Development-Led Archaeology in England, 1990-2015,” (2015),

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/building-the-future-

transforming-our-past/.

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23 Estimates are that only 1 percent of UK planning applications will affect archaeological

remains. See Historic England, “Building the Future, Transforming Our Past:

Celebrating Development-Led Archaeology in England, 1990-2015,” 4,

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/building-the-future-

transforming-our-past/building-future-transforming-past/.

24 See Paul Graves-Brown, “Archaeology and the Polluter Pays Principle,” Assemblage 1

(1997), http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/2/2gb2.html.

25 Historic England, Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment: The

MoRPHE Project Managers’ Guide (Swindon: Historic England, 2015).

26 See, f.ex., the 2012 Olympic Games excavations: Andrew Powell, By River, Fields and

Factories: The Making of the Lower Lea Valley: Archaeological and Cultural

Heritage Investigations on the Site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic

Games (Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology, 2012); Andrew Powell, Renewing the Past:

Unearthing the History of the Olympic Park Site (Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology,

2012).

27 The US system is substantially similar though fewer developments are likely to require this

process, here known as “Section 106.”

28 Thomas Yarrow, “Artefactual Persons: The Relational Capacities of Persons and Things in

the Practice of Excavation,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36, no. 1 (2003): 66–

67.

29 See also Matt Edgeworth, “Follow the Cut, Follow the Rhythm, Follow the Material,”

Norwegian Archaeological Review 45, no. 1 (2012): 76–92.

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30 Kent V. Flannery, “The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the

1980s,” American Anthropologist 84, no. 2 (1982): 265–278,

doi:10.1525/aa.1982.84.2.02a00010; Matt Lemke, “Give Me WHS or Give Me

Death!,” Assemblage 2 (1997),

https://web.archive.org/web/20160114105351/http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.u

k/2/2trowel2.html.

31 Archaeologists often remember their first trowel, and the distress we have at losing one is

often extreme. I personally, and usually unsuccessfully, have resorted to metal

detecting the spoil heap for a lost WHS. See R. Joe, “The ShovelBums Version of the

Kübler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief when Losing/Breaking your First Trowel,” 2015,

http://shovelbums.org/index.php/r-joe-s-blog/archaeology-and-anthropology-

humor/entry/the-5-stages-of-an-archaeologists-grief-after-losing-their-first-trowel.

32 Flannery, “The Golden Marshalltown,” 267–268 (see n. 30).

33 Following the likes of Ewa Domanska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” History and

Theory 45 (2006): 337–48; Bjornar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the

Ontology of Objects (Lantham, MD and Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press, 2010).

34 Ian Hodder, “The Asymmetries of Symmetrical Archaeology,” Journal of Contemporary

Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2014): 230.

35 For an introduction to the archaeology of the steel trade in Sheffield, see James Symonds,

“Steel City: An Archaeology of Sheffield’s Industrial Past,” report prepared for

website Materializing Sheffield: Place, Culture, Identity, 2006,

https://www.dhi.ac.uk/matshef/symonds/MSsym.htm.

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36 O. Burton (Spear and Jackson UK Ltd) email to author, 28 October 2016; “William Hunt

and Sons,” Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History (2016),

http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/William_Hunt_and_Sons. For a useful schematic of the

process see Library of Manufacturing, “Roll Forging” (n.d.),

http://thelibraryofmanufacturing.com/roll_forging.html.

37 T. Mackinder email to author, March 2017.

38 R. Hartle and S. Watson email to author, February 2017; on the 2012 excavation see

MOLA team, “Pompeii of the North,” MOLA (2013),

http://www.mola.org.uk/blog/pompeii-north. For more on the original excavation see

W.F. Grimes, The Excavation of Roman and Medieval London (London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1968).

39 Matt Edgeworth, “Beyond Human Proportions: Archaeology of the Mega and the Nano,”

Archaeologies 6, no. 1 (2010): 138–149; James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten:

The Archaeology of Early American Life (1977; New York: Anchor Books, 1999).

40 See Edgeworth, “Follow the Cut” (see n. 29).

41 Cornelius J. Holtorf, “Is the Past a Non-Renewable Resource?,” in Destruction and

Conservation of Cultural Property, ed. Peter G. Stone, Robert Layton, and Julian

Thomas, vol. 41, One World Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), 286–97.

42 J. Connan, “Use and Trade of Bitumen in Antiquity and Prehistory: Molecular

Archaeology Reveals Secrets of Past Civilizations,” Philosophical Transactions of the

Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 354, no. 1379 (1999): 33–50,

doi:10.1098/rstb.1999.0358.

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43 Matthew Goodrum, “Questioning Thunderstones and Arrowheads: The Problem of

Recognizing and Interpreting Stone Artifacts in the Seventeenth Century,” Early

Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 482–508, doi:10.1163/157338208X345759.

44 Jonathan Gardner, “Hazardous Materiality: Archaeologists and Contaminants” (paper

presented at CHAT Conference, November 9, 2013, University College London,”

https://www.academia.edu/5181599/Hazardous_Materiality_archaeologists_and_cont

aminants; Adrian Chadwick, “Archaeology at the Edge of Chaos: Further Towards

Reflexive Excavation Methodologies,” Assemblage 3 (1997),

https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblage/html/3/3chad.html.

45 “Archaeology in Capitalism, Archaeology as Capitalism,” in Archaeology and Capitalism:

From Ethics to Politics, ed. Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (London and New

York: Routledge, 2007), 114.

46 Holtorf, “Is the Past a Non-Renewable Resource,” 289, italics added (see n. 41).

47 C.G. Cumberpatch, “People, Things and Archaeological Knowledge: An Exploration of the

Significance of Fetishism in Archaeology,” Assemblage 5 (April 2000): 13,

https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblage/html/5/cumberpa.html

48 Edgeworth, “Follow the Cut,” 77 (see n. 29); see also Cornelius Holtorf, “Notes on the Life

History of a Pot Sherd,” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 49–71,

doi:10.1177/1359183502007001305.

49 Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias, “On Contract Archaeology,” International

Journal of Historical Archaeology 19, no. 4 (2015): 687–698.

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50 For an alternative to this in a UK commercial context, see John Lewis, Landscape

Evolution in the Middle Thames Valley: Heathrow Terminal 5 Excavations. Volume

1: Perry Oaks. (Oxford: Framework Archaeology, 2006), 15.

51 Jonathan Bateman, “Pictures, Ideas, and Things: The Production and Currency of

Archaeological Images,” in Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice: Cultural

Encounters, Material Transformations, ed. Matt Edgeworth (Lanham, MD: AltaMira

Press, 2006), 71.

52 See, e.g., Morag Kersel, “Storage Wars: Solving the Archaeological Curation Crisis?”

Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 3, no. 1 (2015):

42–54; Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (London and New York:

Routledge, 2013), chap. 8.

53 Fredric L. Quivik, “Editorial,” IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 39,

nos. 1 and 2 (2013): 2–3.

54 Beaudry, “Concluding Comments: Revolutionizing Industrial Archaeology?”, 31 (see n.

16).

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