It’s been 30 years since Lightfoot published his seminal article on the arbitrary dichotomy between prehistoric and historical archaeology. Yet, problems of this nature persist in California CRM. Precolonial and historic components of sites are regularly treated differently, often investigated by different archaeologists. This practice can result in a disjunction in recording methods, significance evaluations, and interpretive approaches that overlook the “invisible” time period between history and prehistory. Consequently, sites occupied across this temporal divide go unrecognized, as do single component historic period Native American sites. The latter can be misidentified and deemed ineligible because they contain a predominance of Euro-American artifacts and lack definable associations using standard archival sources. Such challenges can be resolved by establishing multidisciplinary teams that include tribal consultants, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists. Recent investigations in Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada show how such problems arise and how they can be mitigated and preemptively avoided.

In 1925, boosters promoted the centennial of Vancouver, Washington, as the “oldest continuous home of white men in the State.” America’s Vancouver numbered slightly over 12,000 people, serving a rural county associated with orcharding, farming, lumbering, and fishing. The event attracted local and State historical societies and booster groups, and included a pageant and the installation of a hexagonal granite monument that touted the start of “civilization.” The centennial promoted a White settler colonial history, and with a few exceptions, ultimately whitewashed the importance of Indigenous and minority populations. Historical archaeology reveals the materiality of a highly diverse population that formed the fur trade colonial site. This work reveals the crucial role of many people in the establishment and development of the fort and its influence on the region. Archaeology strives to build connections between archaeology, place, and descendant communities to promote a more nuanced, inclusive and accessible bicentennial.

During the early reservation period, the US government established successive reservation headquarters for the Crow Tribe (Apsáalooke) of present-day Montana, in part to attempt to “assimilate” Crow people into European American culture. The Second Crow Agency headquarter (1875-1884) has been interpreted archaeologically as an example of Crow people transitioning from “traditional” to European American culture and lifestyle. The presence of artifacts like glass scrapers and Crow items usually found in Medicine Bundles located in the dump area contribute to the evidence many archaeologists and local scholars use to characterize the site as “transitional”. The Crow perspective, however, collected through collaborative ethnographic research, demonstrates how damaging the use of transition is for understanding Crow history and their contemporary culture and values. This paper focuses on these oral histories to challenge the framework of transition, to more accurately present the history of this site, and recenter the agency of the Crow people.

Anglo settlement of the Rio Grande Valley began in the late 19th and early 20th century. Part of this colonization involved the whitewashing of the region’s history, including the erasure of Tejano communities, populated by descendants of earlier Spanish, Mexican, and Mestizo settlers. Historical scholarship has typically minimized this history and instead focused on myths about the 'taming' of the region by Anglo settlers. This paper discusses a collaborative project that began in 2023 at a rancho dating to the 19th and 20th centuries. The paper’s focus is archaeology’s emerging contribution to documenting and raising awareness about the region's Tejano and Mexican American culture. Ongoing efforts include working with descendants and the Texas Historical Commission to secure a historical marker for the site.

The mythos that exists regarding “settlement” of present-day North Dakota largely revolves around the introduction of the railroad and industrial-scale Bonanza farms that followed. The result is a historical narrative that prioritizes a few key actors, all of whom are white, male, and tied to positions of power within corporations and/or politics. Dependent on a network of seasonal and migrant workers, these farms provide fertile ground for exploring the lived realities of individuals who have fallen victim to the silences introduced during the (re)formation of historical narratives. This paper presents preliminary research from the 4e Farmstead Archaeology Project, aimed at examining daily life on one of the Bonanza farms through archival and archaeological research. Located on a modern-day winery, the authors will specifically share how their findings will serve the public through a variety of community engagement opportunities.

The memorialization of sites of Japanese American Confinement is uneven at best, with some sites extensively marked while others remain anonymous. At the same time, practices and histories told about certain spaces create particular narratives about the ways in which places came to be, naturalizing certain histories and alienating others. This paper looks to the myriad of ways in which sites connected to the history of Japanese American incarceration are articulated, at times with physical monuments and memorials, and in other cases, more ephemerally. These practices of memory making are not only intimate to the communities connected to particular places, but consequential to how narratives of history form.

Gender, culture, class, and race all play a role in alcoholic beverage preferences and consumption patterns in the American West. Archaeologists are also keenly aware that the early twentieth century labor void on farms in rural California was filled by peoples from a diversity of backgrounds, including Chinese and Japanese workers. A recent pedestrian survey in Pinnacles National Park identified a large multi-component site composed of historical-period material culture and flaked stone debitage that was discarded along a seasonal wash in San Benito County, California. Fragments of a beer bottle made by the Dai Nippon Beer Company during the early twentieth century forced the archaeologists on this project to question the way we attribute race and ethnicity to archaeological assemblages and alcohol consumption choices. This single artifact is an example of how archaeologists make inferences based on historical documents, advertisements, anthropological knowledge, and cultural stereotypes.

Rural Oregon is a very White place, but it wasn’t always. Over the past several years the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP) has investigated a dozen sites and documented dozens more where Chinese Americans lived, worked, and built community. This paper will explore the ways in which Chinese Oregonians went from 40% of the population in some areas to an exoticized footnote in the historiography of mining and railroad construction. Structural racism and discriminatory legislation played a large part in this erasure, but ahistorical memory allowed communities to infill and reimagine the gaps left by the removal of the Chinese immigrant community from local history. This revised narrative has not only sidelined the many contributions of Chinese Oregonians in the settlement and development of the state, but has helped to create a mythical past celebrating rural Whiteness that has been weaponized in modern politics.

Separated by less than 40 miles, Boise, Idaho, and the nearby Boise Basin share a history that is inexorably intertwined. Although their relative prominence was once reversed, Boise is now the state’s largest urban center while post-gold rush population declines have left the Basin decidedly rural. This evolving rural-urban divide has impacted the way that Chinese American heritage has been preserved and perceived in both places. In Boise, most of the city’s formerly vibrant Chinatown was razed to make way for urban renewal in the 1970s; in the Basin, historic buildings and numerous archaeological resources remain intact but without the community or connections that once animated them. This presentation retraces historical links between Boise and the Basin and explores how modern community engagement might begin to confront the compounding erasures that haunt southern Idaho’s Chinese American past.

In the present day, race and its imagination remains a prominent force that structures and shapes people's lives as it has in the past. This paper uses the lens of racialization to examine Evanston, Wyoming’s Chinatown community from 1870 to 1922 and as an archaeological site in the present. Particularly, I will examine landscape modification and the historical imaginary of Chinatown and how they have played a part in whitewashing and erasing the lived experiences and struggles of the former Chinatown residents. Further, I will identify how popular historical narratives of the Evanston Chinatown are shaped and defined by false stereotypes grounded in past white supremacist attitudes originating in the late 19th century. Finally, I will highlight efforts to reclaim the history of Evanston’s Chinatown for its descendant community and what is being done to recenter Chinese experiences and perspectives in the history of Evanston.