A Tale of Two Places in D’Hanis, TX: Combining Linguistic Anthropology and Historical Archaeology to Study Place-Making on the Texas Frontier

Summary

In this paper, I discuss an archaeological approach to place-making that incorporates elements of linguistic anthropology, drawing from narrative analysis and Bakhtin’s chronotope to analyze oral histories from a small town in southwest Texas. D’Hanis originated as an Alsatian colony on the Texas frontier, one of four settled by empresario Henry Castro in the 1840s. By the 20th century, the town had not simply transformed but moved – the railroad had caused a rupture in the settlement that resulted in an "old" and "new" D’Hanis, two competing towns with the same name approximately a mile apart. Today, few structures in Old D’Hanis remain, while New D’Hanis retains the aesthetic of a western railroad town. Archaeologically, this paper examines the spatial and material strategies that residents used to create two places out of one. Narratively, it examines how the town narrates a sense of place in the past and present. This paper aims to explore how we, as archaeologists, might approach the intersections of material and narrative strategies in our studies of place. Further, it suggests that linguistic anthropological methods and theories offer opportunities for historical archaeologists to better understand how people create and maintain places in space and through time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22133