Technology and Culture

Marco Meniketti is a long-time leader in the field of historical archaeology, and in Timber, Sail, and Rail he combines his professional history with his personal interest in immigration. As an Italian American working in California, he is deeply invested in the extent to which one can read an archaeological site for ethnicity. Given the complex and varied ethnic history of the West Coast timber industry, Meniketti decided to test this thesis. [End Page 1199]

He is the first to note that his successes were modest. In short, the archaeological record does not definitely demonstrate variegated ethnic roles and cultures in this particular California timber camp between 1885 and 1920. Whether this dims your view of this book depends on what you intend on getting from it. While the failure of a thesis might often lead one to question a book's value, Meniketti still goes far in demonstrating the ethnic history of this mill and strongly shows what we might glean from the archaeological record around it.

The Loma Prieta Mill was located outside of Santa Cruz, California. It was a sizable operation in a part of the West Coast that has received less attention from logging scholars than Northern California or the Pacific Northwest. It operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing much-needed wood to the economic engine of San Francisco. Like many of these timber camps, it also had an ethnically diverse workforce, made up of Italian, Irish, Mexican, and French workers. Meniketti provides a solid history of the timber industry in the area around San Francisco to ground readers in the history. He then explores the immigration history of the West, with its usual focus on anti-Chinese agitation among white workers, the rise of Scandinavian labor in the Pacific Northwest, and then the population growth of southern and eastern Europeans.

That history is quite valuable to readers, though many may already know the outlines. But Meniketti's real interest is in the archaeological record. Over three field seasons, he and his team worked with the California State Parks to explore and excavate the mill site. Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in his deep-dive descriptions of the technologies deployed at the site and the histories of their use. From saws to flywheels, Meniketti provides a detailed analysis of timber technology. The geographical origins of bricks in the boiler are used to highlight the globalized nature of the industry, for example.

It is in the housing and detritus left by laborers that Meniketti most hopes to demonstrate the ethnic background of workers. He ran into problems here from already cleared dump sites, but he also managed to excavate several housing arrangements. He and his team found plenty of material, but it proved difficult to make any particular ethnic connections with the objects. In the end, glass artifacts and discarded pocketknives don't provide much of a window into ethnicity. He can guess though. When finding a piece of glass with either Chinese or Japanese etching, he extrapolates that he has possibly found a Japanese person in the camp practicing traditional medicine or a piece of equipment from a Chinese cook killed during the 1906 earthquake. Well, it's something and Meniketti doesn't make elaborate claims for it. He is after all a professional archaeologist with little to prove in his distinguished career. He notes that finding a Scottish pipe, for example, tells us almost nothing about who used it because they were imported in such large quantities at the time [End Page 1200] to be nearly ubiquitous. Again, these may be limited claims, but they tell readers much about life in the timber camps.

In the end, Meniketti's findings may be modest, but Timber, Sail, and Rail is still a valuable examination of the timber industry's technology, culture, and people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth...