Archaeology of Chinese Woodchoppers and the Forests of the Lake Tahoe Basin: Exploring the Intersections of Extractive Industries, Transportation, and Labor

Summary

During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Chinese "woodchoppers" lived and worked in the vast forests of the South Lake Tahoe Basin in the eastern Sierra Nevada, near Genoa, Nevada, leaving distinctive archaeological signatures wherever they worked and lived. The laborers in these isolated camps supplied Nevada’s Comstock mines with forest products, as the Comstock had already depleted its own local sources of lumber, approximately 30 miles away. This relatively well-preserved local cultural landscape of temporary work camps was part of a regional and transnational network fueled by industrial capitalism that provides a catalyst for investigating the intersections between extractive industries, transportation, labor, and the drastic nature of cultural ecological change in the American West.

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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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 551