methodology of recording industrial structures was published by a royal commission in Scotland (Hay and Stell 1986), but a more recent guide based on the practice of the Historic American Engineering Record took a more comprehensive approach (Burns 1989). In the same way, industrial archaeologists are taking an increasingly scientific approach to the analysis of landscapes, using plot-based databases in addition to the literary sources that were the foundation of the pioneering study of this aspect of the discipline (Alfrey and Clark 1993; Trinder 1982).

Rix emphasized in 1955 that industrial monuments could be beautiful, and the representation of industrial structures as artifacts meriting admiration has been a continuing tradition within industrial archaeology, especially in Germany. The publications of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher and Manfred Hamm have stimulated new ways of looking at water towers, railway stations, and textile mills, bringing order to what are often confused contexts and highlighting beauty in unexpected settings (Becher and Becher 1988; Binney, Hamm, and Föhl 1984; Föhl and Hamm 1985, 1988; Hamm 1992) while the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments in England and the Historic American Engineering Record have published books that demonstrate the value of photography as a means of recording (Lowe 1986; Thornes 1994). The importance of historic photographs of industrial subjects was also demonstrated at an exhibition in London in 1986 (Davies and Collier 1986).

The most influential study of the iconography of the Industrial Revolution was the publication in 1968 of a reworking of Francis Klingender’s pioneering study, which first appeared in 1947, but there have been subsequent studies of particular industries and regions (Gray and Kanefsky 1982; Klingender 1968; Smith 1979; Wright 1986) and of some of the classic sources of industrial iconography (Prescher and Wagenbreth 1993). Graphic images have been used with skill in some of the publications of L’Inventaire in France, and elsewhere industrial archaeologists have shown a growing interest in the images conveyed in such ephemera as advertisements and labels (Campigotto and Curti 1992).

Archaeological studies of industrial artifacts are as yet comparatively rare, although this is an area in which there are many overlaps between the interests of industrial archaeologists and the interests of such specialists as collectors of pottery and restorers of vintage motorcars or steam locomotives. Evidence concerning clay tobacco pipes from many countries and many sources has been anthologized in Britain (Davey 1979). Metallurgical techniques that were used in prehistoric and medieval archaeology have not as yet been extensively employed in investigating the industrial period (Tylecote 1986). There are, for example, no published works that provide ready guidance to the identification of slags and other residues of metallurgical processes. Nor have advanced techniques from the materials sciences yet been employed to a significant extent in the study of such historic machines as the first generation of mechanized textile machines and the earliest railway locomotives.

The construction of replicas or large-scale working models is proving an effective means of investigating both the technology of early industrial machines and the ways in which the machines were deployed in factories. This technique was pioneered in Bologna, italy, where a half-size model of a seventeenth-century silk-throwing machine has been built (Comune di Bologna 1980). In Great Britain, full-scale replicas have been constructed of a Newcomen engine at the Black Country Museum and of two of the first steam locomotives, both designed by Richard Trevithick, one at the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museumin Wales and the other at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. Anglo-German cooperation has produced full-scale replicas of carding machines and water frames for the restored mill at Cromford, Ratingen, in Germany, where Johann Brügelmann established the first water-powered cotton mill in continental Europe in 1784.

Most university teaching in industrial archaeology in Europe and North America is done in programs principally concerned with historical archaeology, geography, anthropology, or conservation architecture. There are specialist master’s degree programs at the Ironbridge Institute and at the Michigan Technological University,