American West (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dale. Timothy Maddock.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Company Towns are intrinsically linked to the labor of the American West. Yet such locations are invariably idealized by the industries that created them and villainized by the laborers exploited by them, as company towns both provided resources for their residents and controlled choices. Using...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly S Cannon. Ethan Ryan.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Transitioning from Commemoration to Analysis on the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah: Papers in Honor and Memory of Judge Michael Wei Kwan" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Geophysical survey techniques offer unique approaches to research, preservation, and interpretation, particularly when subsurface testing is limited or untenable. Historic archaeological excavations are severely limited in Utah, given...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renae J. Campbell.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Separated by less than 40 miles, Boise, Idaho, and the nearby Boise Basin share a history that is inexorably intertwined. Although their relative prominence was once reversed, Boise is now the state’s largest urban center while post-gold rush population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michele E. Hoferitza.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Glass Beads: Global Artefacts, Local Perspectives", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Identifying the origin for Prosser beads may lead to a greater understanding of their distribution. In this study, x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis of a collection of 102 Prosser beads of various colors found in southeastern Idaho indicate dramatic variation between elemental composition of the beads. The variations are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Ryan Kennedy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Chinese migrants were integral to creating the American West, including building much of the Transcontinental Railroad and playing critical roles in early agricultural, mining, and fishing industries. These efforts created numerous rural Chinese communities in the American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra C Kelly. Jason L Toohey.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Carbon City was the first coal mining town established along the UPRR in what was then Wyoming Territory. A company town from the start, Carbon offers an intriguing case of how non-Indigenous settlers were incorporated into global networks through labor migration, industrial extraction, and commodity consumption in Carbon during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose. Jaqueline Y. Cheung. Eric Gleason.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 1875 until 1943 treaties, laws, legal opinions, administrative rules, and regulations circumscribed the free movement of the Chinese immigrants in the U.S. and strictly limited the inflow of new migrants of Chinese descent. These efforts had a profound and lasting impact on the Chinese diaspora in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Rural Oregon is a very White place, but it wasn’t always. Over the past several years the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP) has investigated a dozen sites and documented dozens more where Chinese Americans lived, worked, and built community. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renae J. Campbell. Molly E. Swords.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Chinese American woman who would become known as Polly Bemis arrived in Idaho Territory in 1872. Eventually settling on the remote Salmon River with her European American husband, Charlie, Polly’s life has been the subject of literary works and even a Hollywood movie. Despite this attention, many aspects of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ash S. Hunter.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Brothel archaeology is undoubtedly an important part of historical archaeology, but in many ways, this field is still in its infancy. The use of theoretical approaches in brothel archaeology, namely the feminist theories this field has been intimately connected with since its inception in the 1980s, still has room to grow....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas E Ross.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Alma College was a Jesuit seminary in the rural Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos, California that operated between 1934 and 1969. It housed an all-male population of up to 150 Jesuit faculty, students, and support staff and provided training for Scholastics seeking a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Rose.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site represents one of the key interpretive hubs for Chinese heritage in the Pacific Northwest. Once home to the John Day Chinatown, its residents provided medical care, groceries, automobiles, and employment to the citizens of eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dale.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the past decade, the archaeology of the Chinese diaspora has embraced new methods, theories, and questions for investigating the lives of the men, women, and children of America’s 1800s and 1900s Chinese populations. As with archaeology in general, however, Chinese diaspora archaeology has largely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William A. White. III.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Gender, culture, class, and race all play a role in alcoholic beverage preferences and consumption patterns in the American West. Archaeologists are also keenly aware that the early twentieth century labor void on farms in rural California was filled by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina C. L. Eichner. Ericha Sappington.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Drawing on feminist interventions into Western histories, this paper reconsiders the important of laundresses at frontier fort installations. Too often coded as camp-followers and prostitutes, military laundresses were ration-drawing employees of the Army present at all frontier forts through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Ryan Kennedy. Brian M. Kemp.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Late-19th-century Chinese diaspora faunal assemblages from the American West often include a diverse range of fish species imported from many different locations. In these contexts, fish bones serve as evidence not only of the wide-ranging trade networks that connected Chinese diaspora communities, but also of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renae J. Campbell.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Southern Idaho’s Boise Basin was the site of a late-nineteenth-century mineral rush that attracted gold seekers from around the globe to the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. For more than fifty years, this pluralistic population took up residence in small towns...