This is a past event.

Sean Gohman will present "Unalloyed Potential: Envisioning Copper Country Workscapes under an Organic Energy System"

Gohman’s research focuses on the archaeological and archival remnants of extractive practice in the western Upper Peninsula. Concerned with applying landscape-scale perspectives to understanding industrial systems, Gohman’s dissertation work examines how these perspectives add insight into the roles energy transformation, isolation, and technical practice play in the creation of the Copper County’s landscape. Following a brief overview of his research and dissertation proposal, Gohman will discuss his current working paper, which looks at how early actors envisioned the landscape that would become the Copper Country, and how those visions became reality. The results were three-dimensional workscapes formed of a unique mineralogical resource (mass copper), a reliance on organic energy sources, and an isolated geography. Gohman concludes that the specificity of these workscapes may connote a distinct mining industry worthy of inquiry on its own merits, rather than as table setting in the larger story of conglomerate and amygdaloid lode mining.