Late Modernity and Community Change in Lattimer No. 2: The American Twentieth Century as Seen through the Archaeology of a Pennsylvania Anthracite Town

Abstract

The shanty town at the periphery of Lattimer No. 2 began in the 1880s as an ephemeral settlement for new immigrant workers. Situated within the pluralist labor hierarchy of northeast Pennsylvania’s coal region, Italian families created a community here at the edge of an ethnically diverse, but spatially divided, company-town landscape. Here, and in places across the nation, the 20th century brought about transformations in the intimate relationships among individuals, economies, and the state. Giorgio Agamben proposes that the dominant paradigm of this political economy is materialized in places like the shantytown, paradoxical spaces in which “law and fact ... have become indistinguishable,” and individuals exist within “a constant state of exception.” Archaeology conducted in the shanty enclave of Lattimer No. 2, viewed through the long duration of the 20th-century political economy, illuminates this formation through its materialization of shifting landscapes, buildings, and boundaries.