On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passe

Abstract

The focus of my remarks tonight will be on the need for respect and toler ation of seemingly obsolete approaches to scholarship in the history of technology, because these approaches may offer better bridges to certain of our external audiences than our most avant-garde scholarship. My awareness of this phenomenon stems from my participation in the graduate program in industrial archaeology at Michigan Technological Uni versity in Houghton, a program that blends historical archaeology with the history of technology. The industrial archaeology program at Michigan Tech admits students from a variety of backgrounds: from history to engineering to anthropology and archaeology. For roughly a decade I have taught or cotaught a course designed to introduce industrial archaeology students to the history of technology. In that course students get at least a brief exposure to a range of literature from our field, from the old multivolume reference works edited by Maurice Daumas and Charles Singer, to single-volume syn theses like David Landes's Unbound Prometheus and Carroll Pursell's social history of American technology, to specialized monographs and scholarly articles from Technology and Culture and other journals.1 In the process, the course introduces students to various approaches to the history of technol ogy, from internalism to contextualism to social construction. At the end of the course, I have often asked these students what mate rials they enjoyed reading the most and what materials, apart from enjoy