The Department of Anthropology is excited to share an interview with Graduate Student Gwendolyn Jones, conducted by Julia Earle.
When did you first become interested in archaeology? What led you to study labor and coal mining in particular?
If you asked me 25 years ago what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell you an archaeologist. I was always fascinated by local history in my hometown. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, about an hour outside Scranton, and nothing was more exciting to me than coming across old foundations in the woods while on a hike with my family. I chose to study coal mining for much the same reason. My great-grandfather, Julius, was a coal miner and having grown up in near-poverty I have always been interested in class, inequality, and labor. So, when I decided to pursue historical archaeology, I knew I wanted to study underrepresented people’s history in a household-context, and my own poor immigrant ancestors were the perfect focus.
What was it like to be a child growing up in Eckley Miner’s Village? What is the value of taking a child-centered approach in archaeological research?
Childhood was really multi-faceted in Eckley, at times very difficult but also really beautiful. The closer I look at the history and archaeology there, the clearer it is how important children were to the culture and families’ social lives. In most coal-mining towns boys would sometimes have to start working in the breakers at as young as 8 years old, but a lot of the oral histories I’ve read show that most parents wanted their children to be educated and have upward mobility. A lot of these kids who had to work did so out of necessity because their family needed money, as was the case for my great-grandfather. There is so much more to children in Eckley than child labor in the mines, though. They helped the family by picking and selling berries, taking care of animals, selling milk, and by stealing coal from culm piles so their parents wouldn’t have to buy any. Children were almost omni-present in Eckley, running through the streets with free reign of the town in their free time, playing games like kick the can, tag, and “nipsy.” For all the horror stories about child-labor, there are lot of really lovely happy childhood experiences that should be remembered.
We were all children once. Childhood is arguably one of the only universal human experiences. For a long time archaeologists have mostly ignored children, but in the past few decades we’ve started seeing more scholars give them the attention the deserve. It can be hard to see children in the archaeological record unless you have their remains or objects that are undeniably children’s toys, but we know that for there to be adults there had to first be children! I recently saw some great papers by bioarchaeologists at a conference who found an ancient burial for an infant with accoutrement that indicate the baby was viewed as a full person whom the adults burying it loved and honored. Having and caring for a child is such a huge part of many people’s lives for thousands of years, and I think intentionally focusing on children honors that experience, as well as the children’s, and gives us a better understanding of the full scope of past lives.
How are you weaving primary sources like archival records and oral histories together with your archaeological research? Can you tell us about what it is like to study a topic with so much personal significance to you and your family?
Because children aren’t always obvious in the archaeological record, I’m interested in using narrative to tie objects with what we know from oral histories and other archival documents. There’s a great book by Dr. Janet Spector called “What This Awl Means” and in it she takes the archaeology and oral histories to craft a fictional narrative of an object’s life cycle. In crafting this fictional narrative about the awl she explores what life looked like for a particular Wahpeton girl, the actual ancestor of one of her informants/colleagues, as she became a woman. I believe this feminist approach to understanding gender and womanhood translates very well to the archaeology of childhood, giving voice to a previously underrepresented (or worse, ignored) group.
This interest in narrative also comes from my wanting to find a way to weave my grandmother’s voice and stories into my work. Her name is Judy, she turns 90 in June, and we’re very close. My entire life I’ve been told so many stories about her father’s and grandfathers’ experiences working in the mines, all from the point of view of a miner’s child. This has given me a particular appreciation for children’s point of view, emotions, and experiences, which I believe are especially valuable. For example, in most places if a miner died at work his body, if recovered, would be left on his family’s porch or (if you were lucky) he would be brought inside and laid out in the kitchen. Many people, including my grandma and her sister, recount seeing that black horse-drawn carriage go by their home, glad it passed them and didn’t have their family member in it. One day, my great-grandpa Julius’s coworker, the miner he assisted who would always give him a ride to/from work, pulled up to my grandma’s house alone much later than normal. Grammy was about 7 or 8 and immediately blurted out “Is he dead?” and the miner responded “no he’s in the hospital, his leg was crushed by a mine cart. If he died I would call you.” From then until the day Julius left the mines, if he wasn’t home and the phone rang Grammy would have a panic attack, convinced her dad had died. Stories like this give us a deeper emotional understanding of miners’ families’ daily lives.
For you, what was the most surprising or interesting discovery you have made so far in your dissertation research? Are there any questions or topics you were not able to address in your dissertation that you would like to investigate more in the future?
It has been really interesting to look deeper into the positive aspects of children’s lives, looking at play and their social lives. My favorite thing I’ve learned was how in some towns boys would conspire together to lie about their wages to their parents. They’d skim off some of their pay before delivering the rest to their moms and, until union negotiations revealed the truth, the moms were none the wiser since all the boys were bringing home the same payrate. Children are so resilient and good at finding fun and joy. Lewis Hines recalls in a 1911 report to the National Child Labor Commission how in another town the breaker boys on their lunch break looked like a school recess yard, laughing and running around playing games together in the shadow of the breaker.
It’s far beyond the scope of my dissertation, but it would be interesting to look closer at childhood in other coal-mining communities. Eckley was a company town where everyone rented from the company, but in Scranton some miners and their families lived in privately-owned houses. I’m curious how childhood compares and contrasts archaeologically between the two areas. I also generally want to start exploring childhood in new contexts, apply my methods and theory to other archaeological sites. In an ideal world I would love to start a new project on childhood among Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, digging into my ancestry on the other side of my family.
What makes archaeology important today? What can archaeology contribute to the world outside of academia?
There have been a lot of stories in the news recently of young teens dying while at work where they legally should not be employed. Canneries, farm, abattoirs, and lumberyards in the US have all been in the news as children are maimed (or worse) by machinery, and yet many politicians have been trying to loosen child-labor laws. It’s sad to see the worst things I study become more and more relevant in the present, and I hope that the research I and the other archaeologists at Eckley are doing can be a reminder of why worker protections, unions, and child-labor laws are in place and should be protected.