ABSTRACT
The industrial metal-mining communities of the American West offer a unique opportunity to explore the anthropology and archaeology of power. These communities, first emerging on western Nevada’s Comstock Lode within a few years after its discovery in 1859, were an outgrowth of the expansion of industrialism, including industrial technology, highly mobile wageworkers, the labor movement, ethnic enclaves and corporations, throughout the USA (Robbins 1994; Schwantes 1987; Trachtenberg 1982). During the late nineteenth century, the American West in general was transformed from ‘a region dominated by preindustrial societies to a fully integrated segment of the modern world capitalist system’ (Robbins 1994:147). The building of transcontinental railroads quickly developed the industrial infrastructure of the American West and attracted global capital investment. By the turn of the century, large-scale corporations and monopoly capital controlled most
industries in the American West and strongly integrated the region into global markets and the modern world-system. Most commodities harvested in the region-coal and metals, timber, fish and farm crops-were exported with prices set in the global marketplace (Robbins 1994:180; Schwantes 1987:41-42).
