City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Western United States following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo represents a distinctive opportunity for historical archaeology. Rapidly-transforming social, political, and economic conditions, shaped by variation in climate and resources, produced radically different regional circumstances. Over time, however, these “differences” evolved under the influences of processes working at a national and international scale. Although comparative analysis is increasingly unfashionable in historical archaeology, there remains value in looking at contemporary processes playing out in different (but related) places. This session presents current research from two regional centers of the post-1848 American West—Denver and Los Angeles—to highlight opportunities and challenges in tracing common “themes” via archaeological evidence. Topics include gender, identity, health, and infrastructure. Collectively, these papers also signal interconnection between city and country to these topics, highlighting the importance of scale in studying human lives in such distinctive historical circumstances.

Other Keywords
History Of Archaeology • Urbanism • North America: Rocky Mountains • North America: California and Great Basin

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • The "Cable Boom": Public Transportation and the Cityscape of 1880s Los Angeles (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Snead.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> <b>The development of mass transit played an integral role in the development of cities in the 19</b><sup><b>th</b></sup><b> century American West. In particular, the rapid expansion of population in 1880s Los Angeles created complex interconnections between land development,...

  • Finding Common Themes in the Post 1848 Historical Archaeology of Denver (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gene Wheaton.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A remarkably small amount of historical archaeological research and excavation has been conducted within the City of Denver. This is due to what can best be summarized as a lack of interest in the historical origins of Denver and lack of community desire to preserve remnants of that...

  • From Saloon to Secret Still: Distilling Alcohol in Early Twentieth Century Denver (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Coble.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The history of distilling alcohol in early 20<sup>th</sup> century Denver loosely follows the trajectory of other North American cities. The views of settling Euro-Americans followed the long-standing idea that alcohol was part of everyday life. Pre-prohibition saloons were a...

  • Homesteading in Jim Crow Los Angeles County: A Comparative Study of Material Culture at the Alice Ballard Cabin (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Madison Baker.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Black Americans had the opportunity to build achievable wealth through land ownership under the Homestead Act of 1862. Alice Ballard was one of few Black women to homestead in California during the height of the Jim Crow Era. Excavations in 2018 at Alice's cabin site in Los Angeles County...

  • Identity in the Archaeological Record: a Case Study at the Historic Astor House of Golden, Colorado (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gillaspie.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Astor House, a historic building in Golden, Colorado, opened in 1867 during a time when Golden was vying to become the capital of the future state of Colorado. Originally intended as a glamorous hotel, the building operated as such for 25 years before being sold for back taxes. It...

  • The Long and Winding Road: A Historical Archaeology of the Roosevelt Highway and Malibu Road Wars, Los Angeles and Ventura Counties (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stansell.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A crowning achievement of road construction in the 1920s was the completion of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Highway (later designated Pacific Coast Highway) though Malibu in 1928. A wagon road along the beach, only accessible twice a day during low tide, had long been used by...

  • Mortuary Culture of the Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Hallenbeck.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Agua Mansa is a historic ranchero settlement in the San Bernardino valley, established in 1845 by migrants from Abiquiu, New Mexico, on land surrounding the former Mission San Gabriel. The Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery was one of few surviving structures following a flood in...

  • “There it was, water under the baked brown hills of Ojai”: The History and Archaeology of the Senior Canyon Tunnel (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Austin Ringelstein.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On December 13, 1929, The Ojai Newspaper extolled, “WATER is life itself here and without it we are helpless to develop the Ojai Valley.” Evidently, the advent of new water technologies allowed many dryer areas in the American west to rapidly transform into burgeoning agricultural and...

  • Unearthing History: Excavations at the Emanuel Church and Washington School Sites in West Denver (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Paris Cook.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Emmanuel Gallery of the Auraria Campus in Denver represents one of the many remnants of the old Auraria neighborhood, originally a former Episcopal Church built in 1887. Using the artifacts from the 1988 excavation of another small church, alley, and school privy that lay directly...

  • The Use-Life of a Denver Cistern: A Multi Proxy Geochemical and Micromorphological Study (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryun McConnell.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A multi-proxy artifactual, sedimentological, micromorphological, and geochemical investigation of soils collected from a community cistern (Denver, USA) elucidate its use-life regarding westward late nineteenth century Euro-American settlement and early twentieth century residential...

  • The Water Supply Infrastructure of Early Denver (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Kolb.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The City of Denver originated as a gold-mining town. Its geographic location and semi-arid environment posed unique challenges to the development of its water supply infrastructure. Multi-scalar historical and archeological analyses, reveal how the city coped with the challenges of water...

  • Women’s Health and Patent Medicine at the Lucas Museum Site, Los Angeles (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Rivers.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical archaeology presents critical opportunities in the study of health and wellness. This is particularly true for late 19th century Los Angeles, where economic growth and rapid immigration created distinct circumstances. One neighborhood, the Southern District Agricultural Park,...

  • Worth Measured in Beer: The local economy of the brothels in 19th- and early-20th-century Central City, Colorado (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade Luiz.

    This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sex work in the American west held a significant but precarious position during expansion and as large towns and cities sought to establish themselves as legitimate cultural and economic centers in the nation at large. Sex districts during this time mitigated this precarity using a...