Food, trade, and connection in two 19th-century Chinese diaspora sites in the American West

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.

Chinese migrants were integral to creating the American West, including building much of the Transcontinental Railroad and playing critical roles in early agricultural, mining, and fishing industries. These efforts created numerous rural Chinese communities in the American West, which have often been cast as isolated or insular. This paper draws on zooarchaeological data from two rural Chinese diaspora sites – the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters on the present-day Stanford University Campus, and the Aspen Section Camp in southwestern Wyoming – to challenge these assumptions. Faunal data from these sites reveal how residents of each site enacted Chinese cuisine using ingredients sourced from local, regional, and international locations. Food not only helped to maintain connections between these two sites and Chinese communities near and far, it also created new links to other communities across the American West.

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