Exploring Surface Spatial Patterns of Ethnic Chinese Artifacts along the Central Pacific Railroad, Box Elder County, Utah

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Immigrant Chinese workers represented the dominant work force in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad (1863-1869). The archaeological record they left behind provides an important snapshot of the lives of these largely male work camps in the isolated desert of northwestern Utah. Funded by the National Park Service’s Underrepresented Community Initiative and the Utah Division of State History, we conducted two years of intensive inventory of two work camps, four section stations, and two towns that date between 1869 and 1910. The fieldwork involved detailed mapping and recording of the surface distribution of ethnic Chinese artifacts at these various sites. The distribution of ethnic Chinese artifacts, particularly ceramic tableware, indicates a pattern of spatial, and probably social, segregation. However, the surface artifacts also provide a starting point for exploring more sophisticated questions of the living and working conditions at these range of sites and how the workers' social and economic conditions may have changed during the period of construction and after completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26233