Leading Each Other to Water: Queer Archaeology and Consciousness Raising in New York’s Adirondacks

Summary

In 1903, white middle-class women founded Wiawaka Holiday House in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains for "working girls" to have an affordable vacation away from unhealthy factories and cities. In 2013 and 2014, I and dozens of community volunteers (ages 18 to 70) excavated on the grounds of the still-operating Wiawaka Holiday House (now the Wiawaka Center for Women). Underpinning all of the conversations and instruction about interpretation and excavation at the site were the queer archaeological approaches of challenging assumptions and recognizing the deeply intersectional nature of identity. For many participants, the idea of identities not being fixed characteristics was transformative, and they readily engaged with examining how gender, class, and race were (and continue to be) created and enforced, often using their own life histories as examples. In this paper, I discuss how the project was structured to facilitate these conversations; give examples of how participants (and myself) were changed by the experience; and present how the excavations at Wiawaka continue to challenge the status quo.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Mobilizing the Past: Archaeology as Activism

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15254