The winter issue of American Archaeology magazine contains a feature I wrote on the efforts of a team of University of Maryland archaeologists to shed more light on one of the deadliest labor incidents in U.S. history—the 1897 massacre of 25 unarmed, striking ethnic coal miners in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region near Hazleton. “Remembering the Lattimer Massacre” also highlights the efforts of a team of graduate students led by Paul Shackel, the chair of the university’s Anthropology Department, to understand the hard lives of the miners of Italian and Eastern European descent, and of their families, as the miners continued to mine the anthracite throughout the first half of the 20th century.
To report the story, last July I visited a couple excavation sites—backyard garden plots and a backyard privy—slightly north of the massacre site. In late August I also visited Shackel’s laboratory on the College Park campus to examine some of the artifacts he and his students have unearthed during annual excavations the past few years at the miners’ homes.
As Shackel told me, the story is edgier than most archeology stories. That is because the article compares the racism the Italian and Eastern European immigrants faced with the animus a new influx of immigrants—mostly Latinos—have recently experienced in Hazleton at the hands of some of the descendants of the ethnic miners. Ten years ago Hazleton made national headlines when it enacted anti-immigrant ordinances, measures that subsequently have been struck down by federal courts.
The story also resonated on a personal level with me. My mother’s side of my family were descendants of Slovak coal miners who immigrated to Northeastern Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. My maternal grandfather even worked at the age of 11 sorting pieces of coal. Part of the joy of speaking with older residents of the coal “patch” town where the excavations were being conducted was listening to their soft upstate Pennsylvania accents. It was as if my grandparents and great aunts and uncles were once again speaking to me.
Click on the Lattimer Massacre to view a full PDF of the story.