A Disposable Footprint: The Archaeological Legacy of A Single-Use Consumer Explosion at a Minnesota Railroad Boomtown (ca. 1890–1910)

Summary

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

The trillion dollar market for e-commerce sales has transformed the infrastructural landscape into one that delivers commodities to consumers in record time. Amazon Prime freight containers and delivery trucks have provided a ubiquitous convenience that has changed the material realities of our everyday lives in substantive ways. In this paper we explore the origins of this consumer revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as U.S. railroad infrastructures spawned new boomtowns west of the Mississippi, delivered the first single-use commodities to consumers in record time, and propelled dispossession of tribal lands and local ecologies. We discuss our preliminary analyses of artifacts from one railroad boomtown in Winnipeg Junction, MN (ca. 1890-1910) where a large saloon trash midden and historic documents have revealed dramatic details of life for the mostly immigrant residents of this rural boomtown before it was soon abandoned. Crown caps, bottles, dry cell batteries, and imported tableware and alcohol, as well as receipts of purchase, reveal the rapidity with which the railroad provided rural residents access to the latest technologies and fashions. Archaeology here provides an intimate look at the lives of people caught up in early boom-bust towns and the unintended consequences of innovation.

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): 53908