Placing it on the Table...or Under It: Negotiations in the Saloons of Highland City, Montana and the Tavern of Smuttynose Island, Maine

Megan Victor

Placing it on the Table...or Under It: Negotiations in the Saloons of Highland City, Montana and the Tavern of Smuttynose Island, Maine

Year: 2017

Summary

Frontiers are creative, at times chaotic, places of the collusion and collision of ideas; as people encounter one another, as well as the geological and ecological forces of the physical environment, they forge spaces of meeting, interaction, dynamism, and change. These features are inherent to frontiers regardless of time period or geographic region. Having wrapped up the final year of excavations at the mining town of Highland City, Montana (1866-1890), I have compared the assemblage to that of the fishing village on Smuttynose Island, Maine (1623-1775), focusing in particular on the locations' drinking spaces. Saloons and taverns are ideal lenses for the examination of trade and exchange networks, commensal politics, and informal economy. Although separated geographically and temporally, the archaeological record can reveal similar trends from these two sites which speak to the ways that inhabitants of frontier zones interact with one another, the physical environment, and the distant metropole.

Cite this Record

Placing it on the Table...or Under It: Negotiations in the Saloons of Highland City, Montana and the Tavern of Smuttynose Island, Maine. Megan Victor. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435404)