Examining the landscape of enculturation at Euro-American Children’s Homes (Orphanages) and Native American Boarding Schools

Summary

Institutions played an important part in American culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, serving segments of society that could not take care of themselves. While asylums, orphanages, and boarding schools have come to have a negative connotation in modern American culture, these places played a formative role in the enculturation and care for multiple generations and ethnicities in the United States. Particularly, children’s homes or orphanages and Native American Boarding Schools served to educate and raise underprivileged American children and were subject to different ideological constraints because of the different ethnicities that they served. This paper investigates a sample of Euro-American Orphanages and Native American Boarding schools to examine how choices of location and layout reflected cultural beliefs about enculturation of Euro-American and Native American children at the time by using landscape archaeology theory, geographic information systems, and archival archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology of Childhood: From the Past and into the Present   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 428