Sorting / Displacement diagram
This diagram illustrates a section through the open Berkeley Pit and the Yankee Doodle Tailings Pond and indicates where the vast majority of this ‘waste’ material was placed once open pit mining began.
Sources: USGS maps from 1897 Butte Special Map Folio #38 (the ‘Weed’ map) 1914 Butte Photo from the U.S. Library of Congress /www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2007662459/ Aerial imagery Personal photographs
From 1880 until 2000, the mines in Butte produced 9.6 million tonnes of copper. In addition to copper another 4 million tonnes of other metals also came from the mines over this period. This 13.6 million tonnes of material was conservatively 2% of the total material displaced within the city, resulting in approximately 661.5 million tonnes of undesired material being left behind after the various process of sorting.
68
Burkholder and Watson
This text submits two maps to the discourse; two new readings / realities of Butte. Unlike the historic recordings both above and below the ground of the region, these new maps have a specific focus on the condition of the displaced / replaced landscape, thus producing a new understanding of place. This new understanding generates an alternative dialogue of value in order to move beyond the myopic tracing of extraction.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator