Iron & Identity: The Archaeology of the Red Mountain

It might come as a surprise, but the Birmingham region is a hotbed of archeological research. After its founding in 1871, Birmingham was imagined to be the industrial capital of the New South. Workers migrated, especially Black workers, from agricultural setting across Alabama to make it in a new kind of Postbellum urban setting. Early settlements in the Birmingham District were dispersed mining camps. And these camps left a lot of artifacts behind.

Historical archaeologist Will McCollum just wrapped up several months of excavations at the Black iron ore mining camp of Smythe, located in what is now Red Mountain Park. In this talk, he will share some of his initial findings. He will discuss ways he uses the tools of historical archaeology to understand practices undertaken by Birmingham’s Black miners in the crevices of Birmingham’s development as a prototype for urban industrialism in the Postbellum South.

His research turns to the mining camp as a way of mapping the transition from a slavery-based agricultural labor structure to an extractive industrial structure which shared many similarities with its Antebellum antecedents.

Will McCollum is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is originally from Birmingham, although he’s lived much of his life elsewhere. For his dissertation project, Will excavated an abandoned iron ore mining camp in Red Mountain Park, which was occupied from roughly 1890-1920. In his work, he pays attention to questions of race and labor and how they are represented in the archaeological record.