Negotiation, Landscape and Material Use: Agency Expression in Aurora, Nevada

Summary

Negotiation and agency are crucial topics of discussion in areas of colonial and cultural entanglement in relation to indigenous groups. Studies of negotiation often explore not only the changes, or lack thereof, in material culture use and expression in response to colonial intrusion and cultural entanglement, but how landscape use and material culture are related to negotiation and resistance techniques used in response to cultural contact or colonial intrusion.  In these contexts, landscape and material culture are used to understand how individual and group identities, including expressions and ideas of gender, race, and socioeconomic status.  Archaeological evidence surveyed from historic Paiute sites located outside of Aurora, Nevada, and historical documentation are used to track negotiation patterns through landscape and material use and expression.  This paper will discuss the negotiation tactics taken up by the Aurora Paiute population during the late nineteenth century, during the most prosperous points of Aurora’s heyday.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017   •
• Exploring Place in the American West

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 263