Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists in the American Southwest have rigorously explored the Spanish Colonial period of the 1500s through the 1700s. Less, however, has been published or publicized about the historic Southwest from the 1800s to the modern day. A search of the important Southwestern anthropological journal, Kiva, from its first issue in 1935 to its most recent in 2018, for example, yielded only a dozen or so articles focusing on the historic period, with the majority of those discussing the protohistoric, initial contact, and Spanish mission periods. Yet, the diverse populations that powered the railroad, logging, mining, ranching, and other vital industries of the 1800s and 1900s contributed a great deal to the economic, social, and political landscapes of today’s Southwest. This symposium is an effort to consolidate and explicitly discuss the importance of archaeological research of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a more holistic and inclusive historical archaeology of the Southwest.