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Week 3 Practicum:

I think this exercise was valuable for me in showing the number of considerations and variables that go into making what was, it seemed, a fairly simple economic decision of what kind of iron-producing operation to establish, and where to establish it, in the 19th century Adirondack country. The varying resource needs in terms of land, energy, ore, fuel, accessibility, and so on gave us a lot to think about and kept us talking. Although it was fairly easy for us to agree on a suite of possible sites based on our various needs, settling on one took a lot longer. In the end we went back and forth quite a lot, partly due to changing our strategy from one based on importing mineral ore to one based (at least to start out with) on bog ore. From my limited understanding of GIS, it would seem to me that given enough time and appropriate data for each the main considerations (e.g. elevation raster to judge topography, locational data for ore sources as well as period roads or navigable waterways, some kind of way to model the hydrology, and so on) it would be very possible to come up with the objectively ideal locations for iron bloomeries across this whole area. It would be very interesting to see if this correlated with their actual, historically observed locations, or with any of the locations our class chose. As I understand it, targeted evaluation of the desirability of certain parts of a survey area using GIS is an up and coming methodological tool in archaeological survey, right? Obviously this wouldn't be a perfect predictor or anything and obsures historical rather than environmental reasons for the locations of sites (e.g. the bloomery at Greene farm may be where it is because it's on their land, and may be no better or indeed worse than other locations nearby from a resource-based perspective). This is a little off the train of thought of the exercise, but I think this starts to get into how the lessons learned from types of experimental archaeology (or thought-experimental, in this case) that fall on a fairly low level of Mathieu's typology from the week 2 readings could inform methods for achieving the kinds of research that he includes on the upper edges of that typology, the modeling and analysis of entire systems.