"Monarchs of All They See": Identity and the Afterlives of the Frontier in Fort Davis, Texas
Author(s): Chandler E Fitzsimons
Year: 2018
Summary
Fort Davis, a frontier fort in far west Texas tasked with protecting the Overland Trail to California and fighting Comanche, closed in 1891, leaving behind the ethnically and financially diverse town that had grown up around it. This community struggled to redefine itself economically in the years following the fort’s closure, only to find a new lease on life in the first decades of the 20th century as a tourist destination. In this paper, I examine manifestations of intersectional identity in archaeological material from a 1930s dump site in Chihuahua, the town’s Mexican- American neighborhood, excavated as part of UC Berkeley’s Fort Davis Archaeological Project (FODAAP). I ask what these manifestations have to say about the community itself and the larger social forces that were acting to shape the region into its modern form.
Cite this Record
"Monarchs of All They See": Identity and the Afterlives of the Frontier in Fort Davis, Texas. Chandler E Fitzsimons. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441491)
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Keywords
General
Frontier
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Identity
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Intersectionality
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1930-1940
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 627