Between Urban Renewal and Rural Decline: Community Engagement and Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in Southern Idaho

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Separated by less than 40 miles, Boise, Idaho, and the nearby Boise Basin share a history that is inexorably intertwined. Although their relative prominence was once reversed, Boise is now the state’s largest urban center while post-gold rush population declines have left the Basin decidedly rural. This evolving rural-urban divide has impacted the way that Chinese American heritage has been preserved and perceived in both places. In Boise, most of the city’s formerly vibrant Chinatown was razed to make way for urban renewal in the 1970s; in the Basin, historic buildings and numerous archaeological resources remain intact but without the community or connections that once animated them. This presentation retraces historical links between Boise and the Basin and explores how modern community engagement might begin to confront the compounding erasures that haunt southern Idaho’s Chinese American past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow