Social Approaches to an Industrial Past is a pioneering collection which addresses the social context of mining communities. This collection considers social context using ethnographic and ethnohistoric records of various cultures.

A. Bernard Knapp is reader in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow. Vincent C. Pigott is Senior Researcher at the Museum Applied Science Centre for Archaeology (MASCA), University of Pennsylvania Museum. Eugenia W. Herbert is E. Nevious Rodman Professor of History Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College, and book review editor for the African Studies Review.

1 Social approaches to the archaeology and Anthro ology of mining PART I Historical archaeology 2 The fabric and structure of Australian mining settlements 3Gender and community structure on Australian colonial goldfields 4 Bedroom politics: ladies of the night and men of the day 5 Power and the industrial mining community in the American West 6 The mining camp as community 7 Mining, colonialism and culture contact: European miners and the indigenous population in the sixteenth-century Arctic PART II Anthropology and social history 8 'Find the ekijunjumira': iron mine discovery, ownership and power among the Toro of Uganda 9 Mining as microcosm in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa: an overview 10 A risky business: death, injury and religion in Cornish mining c. 1780-1870 11 Silver shackles and copper collars: race, class and labor in the Arizona mining industry from the eighteenth century until World War II PART III Prehistory and protohistory 12 Producing copper in the eastern Alps during the second millennium BC 13Prehistoric copper mining in the context of emerging community craft specialization in northeast Thailand 14 Small-scale mining and smelting in ancient Cyprus 15 Exploiting the desert frontier: the logistics and politics of ancient Egyptian mining expeditions 16 Gold-miners and mining at Bir Umm Fawakhir PART IV Overviews 17 On the value of mixed methods in studying mining communities 18 Mining communities, chaînes opératoires and sociotechnical systems