Forthcoming Book Chapter: Unintended Leafy Legacies of Industry

John Harris during a 2016 vegetation survey as part of historical ecological research of a mining site

After a period of professional growth and family beginnings, I’m finally returning to publish a long-stewed piece of research. Life’s timing, shaped in part by career transitions and the joys of starting a family, delayed this chapter’s debut, but the ideas continued to evolve in the background.

I’m honored to contribute to the forthcoming volume in “Material Culture of Ethnic Diversity in the Industrial West: Cultural Convergence in 19th Century Mining, Lumber, and Railroad Camps.” My contributing chapter is titled, "Unintended Leafy Legacies of Industry: a Montana Case Study in Applying Historical Ecology and Landscape Biography to Historical Archaeology." This work will allow me to make use of the fruits of labor in 2016 and 2017's fieldwork to demonstrate the use of historical ecological approaches to archaeological contexts.

It's working abstract reads:

This chapter reimagines 19th-century industrial landscapes in the American West, not as static ruins of extraction, but as dynamic socio-ecological systems whose histories are legible through the botanical legacies still growing on their surface. By integrating landscape biography and historical ecology, it expands the definition of material culture to include surface vegetation as both artifact and actor, tracing how plants, different ethnic groups, and place co-authored enduring multispecies legacies.

Drawing on archival sources and systematic vegetation surveys at former cabin sites and burial grounds in western Montana. Their survival and spread reveal patterns of cultural persistence alongside the agency of non-human collaborators. This approach reframes industrial settlements as landscapes with biographies, places born, transformed, abandoned, and biologically reimagined. In doing so, it shifts focus from extractive infrastructure to the entangled lives lived within and beyond it. By recognizing these surface vegetation as cultural material, we challenge longstanding divisions between artifact and ecofact, between human intent and ecological process.

To ignore these dimensions is to perpetuate flattening complex histories, erasing ecological agency, and overlooking marginalized voices embedded in the landscape. Without them, we risk misreading these sites as merely degraded rather than dynamically transformed.

Beyond aiding archaeological interpretation, these insights offer pragmatic contemporary relevance. In an era of industrially-led environmental transformations and shifting cultural landscapes heedless of the lessons of the past, understanding how humans and other species have co-adapted in past extractive contexts can inform sustainable site stewardship, community-centered conservation, and new directions in environmental justice. These former camps, now overgrown and seemingly dormant wear knowing "faces." Move over lithics and ceramics, what grows on their surface may be the most enduring archive of all.

For those interested in tracing these botanical legacies further, the HAR Leafy Legacies Database, part of the Deep Time Commons, offers a living archive of ecological memory. Built from crowdsourced contributions, it captures the subtle but powerful conversations between human histories and plant persistence across archaeological sites. From volunteer species rising through industrial debris to resilient greenery anchoring abandoned burial grounds, these indicators help decode the long-term imprints of cultural land use. As observations grow, so does our ability to test site-vegetation relationships, refine predictive models, and develop practical plant guides for fieldwork. I invite colleagues, students, and citizen scientists alike to explore, contribute, or simply browse what this open-access tool reveals about the resilience of place and the entangled authorship of our shared landscapes.