Shades of Confinement: Collaborative Study of a Historic Treescape at Amache National Historic Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Trees—whether planted, pruned, or left to grow in their natural setting—can provide detailed evidence about intention, expertise, and aesthetics of the people who planted or lived among them. This paper overviews the methodologies employed and research findings of scholars studying the trees of Amache, Colorado’s WWII-era Japanese American incarceration camp. A primary strategy for making their prisonscape more habitable, incarcerees planted thousands of trees at Amache and many still exist on-site. High-resolution drone imagery has made mapping these trees much more streamlined and reveals important neighborhood-level patterning. At Amache this broader scale data has been combined with GPR, excavations, and analysis of individual trees deepened through engagement with community members, including experts in traditional plant care. This holistic approach provides a fine-grained view of these critical, often living, heritage resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37880.0