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

Carolyn L. White (Author)

9780826363930

Paperback / softback, published 15 April 2022

280 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.393 kg

Each August staff and volunteers begin to construct Black Rock City, a temporary city located in the hostile and haunting Black Rock Desert of northwestern Nevada. Every September nearly seventy thousand people occupy the city for Burning Man, an event that creates the sixth-largest population center in Nevada. By mid-September the infrastructure that supported the community is fully dismantled, and by October the land on which the city lay is scrubbed of evidence of its existence. The Archaeology of Burning Man examines this process of building, occupation, and destruction.

For nearly a decade Carolyn L. White has employed archaeological methods to analyze the various aspects of life and community in and around Burning Man and Black Rock City. With a syncretic approach, this work in active-site archaeology provides both a theoretical basis and a practical demonstration of the potential of this new field to reexamine the most fundamental conceptions in the social sciences.

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One. Black Rock City: A Description of the World
• Chapter Two. Thinking the World: Social Space, the Accursed Share, and Meshworks
• Chapter Three. The Rise of the City
• Chapter Four. Infrastructure at Burning Man
• Chapter Five. Households at Burning Man
• Chapter Six. Theme Camps
• Chapter Seven. Village Life
• Chapter Eight. The Fall of the City
• Chapter Nine. Epilogue: The Active Site of Black Rock City
• References
• Index