Worth Measured in Beer: The local economy of the brothels in 19th- and early-20th-century Central City, Colorado

Summary

This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Sex work in the American west held a significant but precarious position during expansion and as large towns and cities sought to establish themselves as legitimate cultural and economic centers in the nation at large. Sex districts during this time mitigated this precarity using a variety of strategies. Research into the sex district in Central City, Colorado and the material culture recovered during the 2023 and 2024 field school excavations suggests the development of a brothel economy that operated at a variety of scales moving between the local, regional, national, and international in the goods that were acquired to support the business. Additionally, the movement of sex workers around the region from brothel to brothel further contributed to the brothel economy in different and, sometimes, less tangible ways. This paper examines the unique and flexible economic structures developed to support the brothel businesses of late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Central City, Colorado.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52976