The Archaeology of Burning Man. The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City

Abstract

For ten months of the year the Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada is one of the emptiest spaces in the American West. Between August and October, the silence and vastness of the playa is interrupted by what could be described as a wonder of the modern world: the raising, occupation, and disassembling of Black Rock City; quite possibly the largest seasonally inhabited settlement in the Americas. In the space of a few short weeks, survey teams, machines, shipping containers and porta-potties invade the ‘smooth space’ of this one-time ancient lakebed and transform it into a vast city: ‘striated space’ in the shape of a giant clock, but with the built space forming a semicircle reminiscent of a giant horseshoe. Concentric and radial streets (the latter named for the hours of the day) form city blocks while public plazas punctuate the length and breadth of its great arc. With its infrastructure established the city is ready to meet its festival goers, ‘Burners’, who arrive on mass in a convoy of pickup trucks for the week-long event (in 2019 there were more than 75,000 people). The planned city blocks are then filled by a myriad of camps and provisioning centres. The empty space at the geographic heart of the city forms a grand public plaza and is set aside for Black Rock City’s most famous resident: the ‘Man’, a giant humanoid effigy who will be set ablaze at the festival’s zenith. The ‘burn’ and the carefree expression and chaos that surround it, signifies the climax of the festival, which takes place on a Saturday night. By Monday morning, the entire city will begin to be disassembled. The complex choreography that erected the city is put into reverse. By the middle of October, the city has disappeared and the silence and vastness of the Black Rock Desert returns. The media friendly image of Black Rock city focuses on the immolation of the Man and the spectacle that surround it. But as Carolyn L. White argues in The Archaeology of Burning Man, Black Rock City is much more than the setting for America’s most celebrated summer festival. The contours and temporalities of its urban fabric provide the medium for one of the most ambitious experiments in ‘active site’ archaeology since leading lights in contemporary archaeology came up with the concept earlier this century. What is active site archaeology? If contemporary archaeology is about understanding the very recent past – usually aspects of daily life that we take for granted, but which often go undocumented – active site archaeology puts this into the context of places that are still inhabited and used by people today. This is more than just the study of a lived-in urban setting. As White explains, unlike most archaeology projects, which study abandoned sites, ancient or modern, given that ‘it exists for one week a year, every year’, it ‘provides an accelerated example of the kinds of structures and social situations that people create for themselves’ when they come together, voluntarily, within a time-limited, dense urban setting. Within this wider context, a range of other questions provide the book with direction and structure. How do people live in this city? What are the material signatures of the lives of Burners? How do people set up expedient spaces? And what is important in those spaces? Six meaty chapters take us on an ethnographic tour – what others have termed ‘archaeoethnography’ (Harrison and Schofield 2010, p. 91) – of the materiality and spatiality of Black Rock City by following its cycles of building, occupation, and dismantling. White is influenced by Binfordian ethnoarchaeology and its characteristically detailed