Sacramental Wine Meets Cocktail Culture At Alma College: Religious Tradition And Secular Modernity At A Twentieth Century Jesuit Seminary In The Santa Cruz Mountains

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Alma College was a Jesuit seminary in the rural Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos, California that operated between 1934 and 1969. It housed an all-male population of up to 150 Jesuit faculty, students, and support staff and provided training for Scholastics seeking a career in the priesthood. Today, the site is part of Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve where some former college buildings and associated features survive amidst a wooded landscape. Excavations in 2021 produced a large assemblage of artifacts from the community dump, testifying to everyday life at Alma College between the 1940s and 1960s. Data on personal health and hygiene, meals, alcohol, movies/tv, and other activities reveal that, despite living in a segregated rural environment, the daily lives of college residents were influenced by ongoing tensions between Jesuit religious traditions and values and aspects of secular post-War American culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow