Innovation, Entrepreneurialism, And Entanglement: A Case Study Of Chinese-run Extractive Industries And Resource Frontiers In The American West

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The American West has long been synonymous with frontier romanticism, due in large part to the lingering popularity of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis. Such viewpoints belie the complexity of frontier landscapes where indigenous, migrant, and colonial peoples were, and are, entangled at local, regional, and transnational scales. Notions of salvage accumulation and resource frontiers put forward by Anna Tsing offer a model for understanding frontiers and the many ways they were connected to, and driven by, peoples and networks around the world. This paper explores these ideas using zooarchaeological data from Chinese diaspora sites in the American West related to Chinese-run extractive industries like salt fish and bear paw production. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how Chinese-run food industries resulted from a complex set of relationships between market demand in China, conflict between Chinese and Anglo laborers, and the localization of Chinese technologies, including food preservation techniques, to North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 690