In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two countries that would soon emerge as the most dynamic economies in the world -- Japan and the United States -- erected the edifices of their increasingly science and technology driven societies on the backs of two remote copper mines: the Ashio in Tochigi Prefecture and the Anaconda in Montana. Although located in very different cultural, social, and political environments, the Ashio and Anaconda copper mines followed strikingly similar paths of technological growth and development. Both mines epitomized the high-modernist engineering ethos of legibility, rationalization, and efficiency. The mines also resulted in devastating environmental damages that were closely associated with changing technologies. Vast amounts of previously isolated heavy metals and other potential toxins were brought to the surface where they caused severe problems for farmers, ranchers, and everyday citizens, and difficult challenges for engineers trying to control these complex systems.
Intellectual Merit The project's overarching research goal is to compare the different ways Japanese and Americans reacted to the arrival of modern technological landscapes. Both Japanese silkworm farmers and Montana cattle ranchers witnessed the environmental effects of copper smelting through changes in their animals and crops, organisms that might be seen as bio-indicators in a complex organic machine. How did the role of these bio-indicators differ between an Asian Buddhist society and a Western Christian one? To what degree did farmers and miners, both engaged in engineering the environment, create and deploy forms of knowledge to justify their economic activities? What do these questions say about the future of global mining? The Ashio and Anaconda sites offer a rare opportunity for a truly international and cross-cultural research project to answer these questions. The Investigators will examine the culturally and socially determined constructions of and reactions to engineered spaces, industrial technology, and their environmental and social fallout.
Broader Impacts The Investigators will draw on innovative methodological approaches influenced by recent histories of technology and the environment. These include the concept of "enviro-technical" hybridization, which breaks down traditional divisions between human and natural systems. In this light, the Investigators will study silkworms and cattle as biologically engineered indicators in complex ecosystems, analyze mining industries as creators of "natural" environments, and view farmers as engineers of the landscape. Further, the Investigators propose to analyze the Japanese and Montana mines in terms of new geographical concepts of verticality that closely link subsurface and surface environments in a contiguous industrial metabolism. To these ends, part of this project will be to create a web-based industrial archaeological catalog of both sites. This project will generate innovative insights into global environmental, technological, and cultural change that will be of interest to both historians and policy makers. Results of the project will be disseminated in several forms: a co-authored monograph on the subject and a website that includes industrial archaeology and maps. The project will also provide funds to three graduate students to support research and training.
