Global Ghosts: Labor, Consumption, and Globalization at Carbon City, Wyoming

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Carbon City was the first coal mining town established along the UPRR in what was then Wyoming Territory. A company town from the start, Carbon offers an intriguing case of how non-Indigenous settlers were incorporated into global networks through labor migration, industrial extraction, and commodity consumption in Carbon during the late 19th century. This paper explores emerging globalization in the American West and how communities both maintained and transformed belonging through material practices on the frontier. We trace the ethnogenesis of a white, frontier identity through labor, consumption, and spatial organization (establishment of ethnic neighborhoods, burial practices, etc.) We examine how these new communities simultaneously manipulated global connections and appropriated Indigenous belonging in order to construct new American identities rooted in industrial capitalism. As a contemporary ghost town, Carbon paradoxically continues to anchor frontier communities of the American West through shared heritage practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow