What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in 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.

The American and Canadian West(s) are constructed, imagined, and bounded by mythologies. As Purser and Warner (2017) note, “Historical archaeologists...work at exactly these paired nexus points between past and present, and between myth and reality.” Myths about the West, settler colonialism, movement and mobility, and frontiers are persistent in national and popular narratives, which in turn inform identity, memory, and even policy. Frontier myths enable ongoing erasures and make monolithic, exclusionary histories out of contested, nuanced, and diverse worlds of experience. In this session, we question the who, what, when, where, and why of the West (Wylie 1993); address the ways mythic notions persist in dialogue with identities, nationalisms, and histories; and examine convergences and differences in the myths that uphold the American and Canadian West. Drawing examples from our research, we destabilize frontier mythologies through work with communities, archives, and the material record and demonstrate new paths forward.