Industrial archaeology is a recent science, having strong interdisciplinary connotations, which in the general historical field refers to the increasingly felt need for a chronicle which recovers all aspects of the transformation of human life and civilisation. It is therefore a scientifically accurate chronicle giving due consideration to the history of the population in terms of economy, society, politics, art and customs, as well as the history of techniques and technology, which are understood as having the capacity of placing the technological scientific processes, procedures and machines into the real context of those places, areas, factories, houses and villages where the men who operated these machines lived and dedicated their lives to these procedures and processes.

Industrial archaeology was created in England around the fifties in order to prevent the disappearance of the remains of the Industrial Revolution and spread to other European and non-European countries within a short space of time before it reached Italy at the beginning of the seventies.
Its creation is characterised by spontaneity, amateurishness, passion and curiosity. Furthermore, its non-academic content is underlined by the respective professions of its creators: Kenneth Hudson was a journalist and Brian Bracegirdle was a photographer.

The name was formulated by Michael Rix.
As Franco Borsi wittily points out, at first sight the combination of the noun ‘archaeology’ with the adjective ‘industrial’ provokes a kind of perplexity, and produces a sort of ‘semantic noise’. It would seem this uneasiness derives less from the absence of clarity than from the inherent contradictions in bringing together the two terms and their traditional meanings. The most commonly accepted meaning of ‘archaeology’ is the science of antiquity, which is even characterised by a certain taste for the archaic, the remote, the initiated or highly specialised; the meaning of ‘industrial’ is the complex phenomenology of economics, production, technology, and to a very small extent art, which is connected with the myth of progress, present trends and futurology. The argument deriving from the use of both these terms falls down when we abandon the traditional concept of archaeology as the history of art, and we embrace the concept of archaeology as history and no longer as a science annexed to history.
We should also bear in mind that contemporary aesthetics and art history have overcome the concept that useful objects are anti-artistic and have fully hypothesised the poetry of the machine which goes from the functional tradition of modern architecture to Sironi’s paintings, the charm of town outskirts, and the images of negative phenomena caused by industrial civilisation within the urban context, landscape features and everyday life.

Arising from all this we find that the aim of industrial archaeology, as Massimo Negri says, is essentially the knowledge of industrial monuments - that is their location and the identification of their distinctiveness from different points of view: history, architecture, technology, town planning, art, but also customs and social life - and the formulation of hypothesis and proposals for their protection and eventual revitalisation.

From a chronological point of view, industrial archaeological investigation usually begins with the eighteenth century and ends with the period between the two World Wars, however, as Antonello Negri points out, it is extremely difficult to fix rigid temporal limits at either the earlier or later part. A solution to the problem can be had by indicating the watershed in the first period when industrial production became a dominating characteristic of social life, which in general coincides with the spread of the capitalistic method of production. At the same time however, it is important to remember that various scholars from the Anglo-Saxon school consider all evidence of human productive activity as artefacts of industrial archaeology, independently of the historical location.
As for a demarcation of this discipline between the past and the present, it may be said that there is no point where industrial archaeology finishes: in fact technological development continues to produce remains which immediately become objects of historical interest. On the other hand, some constructions which still perform their original productive functions and services are to be considered as industrial monuments.

Industrial archaeology is mainly concerned with those constructions where productive and transformation processes were - and in certain cases are still - carried out.
These constructions - among which the factory stands out as the meeting place par excellence for capital and labour and, furthermore, the place where not only things but also ideas are produced - are at the centre of a more or less close network of service structures, like bridges, railways, stations, canals, shops, also workers’ dwellings and neighbourhoods, large markets, water systems, schools for educating workers, ports etc. These have collectively contributed to the creation of the kind of industrial landscape which was clearly defined in England at the beginning of the 18th century and subsequently became widespread in many parts of Europe and North America, frequently in terms of radical alteration to the pre-existing environmental situation.

The machine is the other protagonist in industrial archaeology.
In spite of its constant presence in industrial life, it is less noticeable on the ground, even though it has been the main instrument of transformation. The machine is the one artefact which more than any other is subject to the effects of technological renovation and is therefore more easily ejected from the production process, that is to say destroyed or scrapped.

The factory and the machine, as much as all the relative infrastructure,
are not explored in a detached and isolated manner but rather as part of a system which has historically, socially and economically determined the area and modified the landscape, so that it can no longer be qualified as natural but rather industrial.

Therefore industrial archaeology finally consists of the physical remains which provide evidence of the transformation the environment has been subject to following the impact of industry on the area, and their spatial and functional connections.

This involves one of the fundamental themes which make industrial archaeology one of the strong points of a renewed policy in the field of cultural heritage, also owing to the close ties it has with our present.
The message it is able to convey involves a very wide range of interests extending from the history of techniques and production through the more general sphere of the relationships between man and his physical environment, to the aesthetic field considered as having an accepted meaning rather different to the conventional one.
On this matter, various scholars, including Franco Barbieri, have pointed out the absolute need to escape from the residual idealistic myths which only tend to value objects, in their qualified uniqueness, as the result of unrepeatable but pure individual intuition.
This gives one the freedom to approach a complex range of events, the extent of which has been unexpected up to now, rightly falling within the all-comprehensive accepted meaning of cultural heritage: an authentic means of conveying content which involves the widest and most diverse aspects of community life.
Consequently, the industrial archaeological presence should be understood in all respects as those monuments which assume relevance as they are the physical remains of a process permeating through an entire phase of human civilisation, taking on the value of symbols with their own language, which is indicative of communication methods induced by the new system for producing goods and by the living standards of the masses created by industrialisation.

This is how the final and primary object of industrial archaeology ultimately becomes the culture of industrialism, or rather the way of life and the ideas which have produced, and at the same time, have been produced by factories, machines and the various workplaces.

The factory, as already mentioned, not only produces things but ideas as well: for example it brings with it a certain kind of discipline, hierarchy, use of time, space, and the relationship between public and private life.

by Francesco Tavone