ABSTRACT
‘Archaeology’ and ‘the twentieth century’ are terms that do not easily co-exist. ‘Archaeology’ has associations with Stonehenge and with the excavation of Roman villas, and ‘industrial archaeology’ is traditionally linked with the period between the Seven Years War and the Great Exhibition, with Cromford, Blaenavon, New Lanark, the Albert Dock and Swindon. Yet one twentieth-century archaeological site of some importance in British history was by the 1990s already displayed in much the same way as the Roman villa at Chedworth or the foundations of Richard Arkwright’s second mill at Cromford. In the Old Port of Montreal visitors can observe the outline of the concrete foundations of a thirty-two-storey grain elevator erected in 1912, together with associated fragments of rubber belting, twisted steelwork and rusting electric motors. The conserved ruin conveys a vivid sense of the scale of the Canadian grain trade and, indirectly, of its impact on Great Britain, and provides enlightening evidence of the new materials of the early years of the century. The elevator encapsulates the fundamental, if elementary, concept on which this book is based – that our understanding of the twentieth century is increased by an awareness of its archaeology, of the artefacts, images, structures, sites and landscapes of the past 100 years. The site of Elevator No. 2 in the port of Montreal, a thirty-storey concrete structure, built in 1912, when Montreal handled more grain than any other port in North America. The remains of the elevator are preserved as an archaeological site by Le Vieux Port de Montréal. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315025070/f93c3fbd-5133-41cc-bbde-8828259a62b7/content/fig1_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> (Photo: Barrie Trinder)
