Living Archaeology, Artifacts, and Implications in the Thais in Illinois Oral History Project

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The goal of this project is to document the Thai American immigrant experience, in order to empower Thai American teens today through participation in oral history collection and to educate the public about Thai American culture and language through a moving museum and learning curriculum. To this end, we have conducted ethnographic field work, literature review, and lab work to digitalize, document, and analyze material culture of Thai Americans from the greater Chicagoland area, primarily members of the Chicago Wat Dhammaram (Buddhist Temple). We use a framework of archaeology of the contemporary, including ethnoarchaeology, to interpret modern day materials that have historically not been considered with archaeological methods. This project relies on community members providing artifacts rather than “finding” them in a traditional sense, allowing us to conduct an archaeology of a real-time archive and enabling us to apply retrospective ideas onto a proactive context. The implications of this research are how the larger project and any future projects will be conducted to create a more diverse historical record and teaching material, for the study of Thai Americans and beyond.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52742