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

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2024

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.

Other Keywords
Migration • Fur Trade • Archaeology • Military Fort • Timber • Labor • African Americans • Company Town • landscapes • Gender

Geographic Keywords
American West • American Southwest • Texas • British Columbia • Western Canada • Western U.S. • Canada West

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • African Americans and the Western Timber Industry (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Hangan.

    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. In the 1920s to survive a slump in the supply of timber in the south, lumber companies moved out of the south to new timber markets in westerns states such as California and Arizona spurring a migration of highly skilled Black workers out of the south to the west. This migration, though seemingly...

  • Apex, Arizona and the Myth of the Company Town in the American West (2024)
    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...

  • "As one looks at the stone the questions arise": Nativism, Mythologized Histories, and the Conservation of Cultural Heritage in British Columbia (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie J Halmhofer.

    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. This presentation will shed light on the Native Sons of British Columbia (NSoBC), an influential 20th century fraternal nativist organization in British Columbia (BC) who in 1925 successfully lobbied for the creation of BC’s Historic Objects Act, the first broad heritage protection legislation in...

  • A Landscape Archaeology of Dispersed Chinese American Communities in the Southwestern Urban Frontier (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura W. Ng.

    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. Historically, Chinese Americans in the Southwestern United States were less visible than their West Coast counterparts, as only a handful of Chinatowns existed in the region. Although Chinatowns were few and far between, Chinese Americans often formed dispersed communities where they often labored...

  • Myth, Ruin, Memory: Whiteness and the Construction of a European Frontier in Texas (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia G Markert.

    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. Frontier myths rely on invisible notions of whiteness and monolithic narratives of movement. In the mid-19th century, Alsatian and German migrants arrived in Texas as part of an empresario-led colonization program. In this paper, I visit the archives, ruins, and oral histories of Alsatian Texas to...

  • The Northwest is our Mother: Fur Trade Archaeology and the Erasure of Métis History in the West (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kisha Supernant.

    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. The Métis are a post-contact Indigenous people who emerged from early encouters between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous fur traders in what would become the Canadian west. The imagining of the Canadian West by historians and archaeologists, however, has perpetuated myths around early...

  • "A Terror to the Camp, Wherever She Finds Herself": Confronting the Mythologies Around Frontier Army Laundresses (2024)
    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...

  • To Go North: Stories of Black Settlement and Imaginaries of Black Sovereignty on the Canadian Frontier (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay M. Montgomery. Lisa Small.

    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. The “West” as a space of radical autonomy and economic opportunity has played a central role in shaping the logic of settler colonialism in North America during the nineteenth century. While some Black arrivants moved to Canada’s western frontier, many others moved north in search of freedom from...