Transcontinental Railroad as a Landscape not a Ribbon

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Transitioning from Commemoration to Analysis on the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah: Papers in Honor and Memory of Judge Michael Wei Kwan" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

When historians and archaeologists typically analyze a historic railroad, the frame of reference generally rests on the railroad line itself, and those few and scattered places where workers lived during construction and maintenance. A railroad, however, was a living and breathing organism modifying thousands of acres of physical landscapes to accommodate the line. Quarries for ballast and culverts, water pipelines, water control features, timber cutting and milling, steel mills and iron mines, roads, telegraph lines, non-native plants for beautification and erosion, and a thousand other modifications to the natural landscape are needed for a successful railroad. Broadening the frame of reference to the veins and arteries of a railroad can open new interpretive doors and continue to dispel notions of isolation and desolation in western railroads and communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021   •
• Transitioning from Commemoration to Analysis on the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah: Papers in Honor and Memory of Judge Michael Wei Kwan

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology