Summary
Dr. White’s research traces the historical paths of industrialization, and with a particular focus on the North American mining industry. He has approaching three decades of experience in the archaeological documentation of mining sites in the American West. His research takes a broad perspective of the industry, examining the social, technological, and environmental transformations associated with past and present mining, and including how historical relationships perpetuate colonial relations in the present. He has worked also as a consultant for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and conducted safety hazard assessments on abandoned mining lands. His book, The Archaeology of American Mining (2017), received the 2019 Mining History Association’s Clark Spence Award.
Research interests
- Space and place
- Materiality
- Western mining
- Environmental history
- 19th and 20th-century colonialism
- Ethnohistory
- Cartography, with regional foci in the American West and the Pacific
Courses taught
- GEOG 106: Introduction to Cultural Geography
- GEOG 314: Geographic Methods
- GEOG 412/612: The Power of Maps: Fundamentals of Cartography
- GEOG 702: Professional Development: Research Design
Education
- Ph.D., Anthropology, Brown University, 2008
- M.S., Industrial History and Archaeology, Michigan Technological University, 1999
- M.A. Anthropology, University of Auckland, 1996
- B.A. Anthropology and Geography, University of Auckland, 1995
Selected publications
- P. White. 2025 [in press]. Illustrating Injury: Drawing Out the Worker from Industrial Accident Reports, in Excavating Bodies in the Archives: Generating New Methods and Collaborations, eds. Shannon Novak and Alanna Warner-Smith Santa Fe: SAR Press.
- P. White. 2024. Alaska, Gold Mining, Archaeology of Work, 2015, in Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing, eds. Denielle Elliott and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, 307-316. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- P. White. 2024. Mining Life Cycles and Indigenous Dispossession in North America: A View from the American West, in The Global Life of Mines: Mining and Post-Mining in Comparative Perspective, eds. Antonio Maria Pusceddu and Filippo M. Zerilli, 113-139. New York: Berghahn Books.
- P. White, with contributions from Dan Renshaw. 2021. A Mill Man's Day: Task Scheduling at Alaska's Gold Cord Mill. IA: Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 45(2): 41-60.
- P. White. 2017. The Archaeology of American Mining. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.