Living and Dying in 19th-Century Farming Communities During Westward Expansion, from New England to the Mountain West

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Living and Dying in 19th-Century Farming Communities During Westward Expansion, from New England to the Mountain West" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster session brings together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students who have been contributing to the Settlement Ecology of Early Rural America (SEERA) project over the last 7 years. This is a community-based research project that seeks to understand the transition to commercial farming in the U.S. during the late 1800s and how it related to farmstead and community socioeconomics, landscapes, demography, and memorializing of the dead in Madison and Onondaga Counties in NY and Boulder County, CO. Previous work has established the timing of commercialization in Madison County and the impacts it had on gendered labor patterns, relationships between farming and labor, household consumption practices, and mortality patterns. Posters in this session delve into changes in socioeconomic disparities, landscapes, health, and cemeteries during the transition in NY. In addition, several posters come from work that is beginning to explore the conditions for those moving west to Colorado at this time, including the relationship between socioeconomics and immigration and the landscapes of entertainment and vice that sprang up in the west around these newly settled farmers, ranchers, and miners.