Roadside America in the West: History along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail

Summary

The highways and byways of the Colorado/New Mexico borderlands are dotted with publicly funded roadside interpretive signs providing a short history of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The goal of these signs is commemoration and education of the traveling public, yet the facts are questionable and nuances are flattened. Must accuracy be sacrificed to achieve brevity and accessibility? The time has come to challenge the roadside nationalist narrative in favor of one that people who live and motor along the trail in 2015 might actually recognize. Every semester we stand before classrooms as diverse as these borderlands highway travelers. Archaeology as a discipline is well placed to share stories of the Santa Fe Trail with the descendants of those who lived along it, incorporating their perspectives. A roadside interpretive sign is a limited genre, but surely we can do better than the shopworn tales they currently provide.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• A Different Angle of View: Doing Contemporary Historical Archaeology from the West

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 300