In the Crossfire of Canons: A Study of Status, Space, and Interaction at Mid-19th Century Vancouver Barracks, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Washington

Summary

The U.S. Army’s Fort Vancouver in southwest Washington served as the headquarters for the U.S. Army’s Pacific Northwest exploration and campaigns from 1849 to World War II. During the mid-19th century, members of the military community operated within a rigid social climate with firm cultural expectations and rules of behavior that articulated with Victorian notions of gentility. Excavations of residential areas occupied by junior officers, non-commissioned officers, laundresses, and enlisted soldiers provided an opportunity to explore the daily lifeways within military communities on the frontier. This paper examines how the military system reproduced and reinforced culturally idealized class and gender roles through multiple nested levels of constructed space. Acting as metaphors, objects, such as buildings, foods, and personal items, facilitated this process through non-verbal distribution of symbolically encoded information that simultaneously embodied and transmitted military ideology and Victorian idealized gender roles.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Disrupted Identities: Colonialism, Personhood, and Frontier Forts   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 168