There is no agreed definition of industrial archaeology. My own preference is that it is a field of study concerned with investigating, surveying, recording, and, in some cases, with preserving industrial monuments. An ‘industrial monument’ in this context iis any relic of an obsolete phase of an industry or transport system, but in practice it is useful to confine attention to the monuments of the last 200 years, both because earlier periods are dealt with by more conventional archaeological or historical techniques, and because of the sheer mass of material dating from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.