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Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Social Sciences

Advisor 1

LouAnn Wurst

Committee Member 1

Melissa F. Baird

Committee Member 2

Jonathan E. Robins

Committee Member 3

Terrance Martin

Abstract

This dissertation is based on the analysis and interpretation of faunal remains from several cordwood chopper’s sites, the Coalwood, Roscoe, and Zerbal camps, operated by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company (CCIC) in what is today the Hiawatha National Forest. Excavations at these camps in 2014 and 2016 and the 20,528 bones recovered provide a robust dataset to help understand how the workers and boardinghouse keepers provisioned themselves. Typically logging companies provided workers with meals as a key part of their wages. However, one of CCIC’s management strategies was to invest as little capital in their cordwood camps as possible. Included in this business decision was selling boardinghouses to individual keepers and not supplying workers with food. However, this exploitive practice created a space for workers to have a greater deal of choice in respect to what they ate. The results of my analysis revealed a great deal of variability between individual contexts. Even though beef was the most important meat for residents in the Coalwood District, there were noticeable differences in the types and values of butchering units between assemblages as well as in the distribution of identified species and amounts of wild game. Analysis of faunal remains recovered from the Coalwood District did not reveal strong linkages between ethnicity or household context to diet and foodways, at odds with my initial assumptions about the importance of these factors. This dissertation addresses the question of the food choices and strategies employed by cordwood choppers and their families to better understand if diet and foodways were important avenues for workers to express control over their material conditions.

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