Industrial Archaeology and the Archaeological Community: Fifty Years On

This paper is an expanded version of the annual Beatrice de Cardi lecture presented at the Council for British Archaeology's weekend meeting held in October 2009 to celebrate both their involvement in the discipline of industrial archaeology and the 300th anniversary of the first successful smelting of coke by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale in 1609. It discusses in depth the CBA's championship of the fledgling discipline of industrial archaeology in the early 1960s, together with the highly significant but frequently neglected developments in Northern Ireland. The paper then considers the development of industrial archaeology in public and professional archaeology in the second half of the 20th century and concludes that the definition of industrial archaeology adopted by the CBA in 1959 helped to pave the way for its considerable growth in that period.