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A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
The mythic American West, with its perilous frontiers, big skies, and vast resources, is frequently perceived as unchanging and timeless. The work of many western-based historical archaeologists over the past decade, however, has revealed narratives that often sharply challenge that timelessness.
Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens reveals an archaeological past that is distinct to the region-but not in ways that popular imagination might suggest. Instead, this volume highlights a western past characterized by rapid and ever-changing interactions between diverse groups of people across a wide range of environmental and economic situations. The dynamic and unpredictable lives of western communities have prompted a constant challenging and reimagining of both individual identities and collective understandings of their position within a broader national experience. Indeed, the archaeological West is one clearly characterized by mobility rather than stasis.
The archaeologies presented in this volume explore the impact of that pervasive human mobility on the West-a world of transience, impermanence, seasonal migration, and accelerated trade and technology at scales ranging from the local to the global. By documenting the challenges of both local community-building and global networking, they provide an archaeology
of the West that is ultimately
from the West.
List of contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens
Margaret Purser and Mark Warner
Part 1. Economics and Economies
1. Boomtimes and Boomsurfers: Toward a Material Culture of Western Expansion
Margaret Purser
2. The Archaeology of San Francisco’s Gold Rush Waterfront, 1849–1851: Building a New Model of the 19th-Century Pacific Rim Maritime “Frontier”
James P. Delgado
3. “Where Ornament and Function Are So Agreeably Combined”: A New Look at Consumer Choice Studies Using English Ceramic Wares at Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Vancouver
Robert J. Cromwell
4. Approaching Transient Labor through Archaeology
Mark Walker
Part 2. Archaeologies of Race and Racism
5. “Can We Separate the ‘Indian’ from the ‘American’ in the Historical Archaeology of the American Indian?”
Joe Watkins
6. Rock Hearths and Rural Wood Camps in J¿nsh¿n/G¿m Saan ¿¿: National Register of Historic Places Evaluations of 19th-Century Chinese Logging Operations at Heavenly Ski Resort in the Lake Tahoe Basin
Kelly J. Dixon and Carrie Smith
7. Archaeology of the Chinese and Japanese Diasporas in North America and a Framework for Comparing the Material Lives of Transnational Migrant Communities
Douglas E. Ross
8. Digging Yesterday: The Archaeology of Living Memory at Amache
Bonnie J. Clark
Part 3. Reassessing the West
9. The Cultural Context of Commerce: Historical Anthropology and Historical Silences along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail
Minette Church
10. Our Dangerous Discipline: Doing Historical Archaeology in Utah
Timothy James Scarlett
11. The Mild Wild West: Settling Communities and Settling Households in Turn of the Century Idaho
Mark Warner
Epilogue: Digging Holes in the American West
Matthew Johnson
Contributors
Index
About the author
Mark Warner is a professor of anthropology and department chair at the University of Idaho. He is the author of Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity. Margaret Purser is a professor of anthropology and department chair at Sonoma State University.
Summary
The mythic American West, with its perilous frontiers, big skies, and vast resources, is frequently perceived as unchanging and timeless. This volume reveals an archaeological past that is distinct to the region, highlighting a western past characterized by rapid and ever-changing interactions between diverse groups of people across a wide range of environmental and economic situations.
