Celestial Sojourners in the High Sierras: The Ethno-Archaeology of Chinese Railroad Workers (1865–1868)

Abstract

This exact paper with 30 slide illustrations was presented originally at the 1969 meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) and led to the formation of the SHA’s Overseas Chinese Research Group. It is useful for measuring paradigmatic shifts in the field. The presentation summarized the then-known ethnographic descriptions of Chinese railroad workers, described the archaeological materials found at their work camps at Donner Pass nearly 50 years ago, and proposed that these cultural materials represented an archaeological “horizon style, ” one indicative of the immigration of Chinese laborers worldwide, with their initial arrivals in many countries dating between 1850 and 1870.