Writing Wednesday: The Units

Over the few weeks, I’ve been writing an appendix to my book on oil, photography, and archaeology in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota. The appendix is a brief summary of our work in the Bakken grounded in our publications for a reader who might not be entirely familiar with our work and who might want a more firmer grounding in a traditional archaeological narrative. Here’s part 1 and part 2, and below is the third of three parts. III.3: The Units The organization of the camps reflected a complex interplay between camp owners, managers, housing units, infrastructural needs, capital, and residents. These affordances created distinctive spaces that shaped life in the camps themselves. In Type 1 camps, for example, the modular design of the housing units offered a number of standard rooms generally aligned along a hallway. The width of the unit — generally standardized for transportation by rail and by road — dictated the side of the unit. At some camps, a “double wide” arrangement…