Creating Chinese American Teaching Trunks

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Engaged Historical Archaeology in the Northwest", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For over 40 years the University of Idaho has conducted archaeology on a myriad of sites occupied by the many Chinese and Chinese American citizens who lived in Idaho in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cumulatively, this work has generated a great deal of knowledge about their contributions to the development of the state. While some of the archaeological findings have been shared with contemporary communities the outreach has been somewhat sporadic. This work describes an initiative to create archaeology-focused teaching trunks for elementary students in Idaho in collaboration with a portion of Idaho’s contemporary Chinese American community, exploring how the trunks were conceived and produced as well as initial feedback on how the trunks were received by community members.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Community Engaged Historical Archaeology in the Northwest

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow