Investigating Social Identity Formation and Developing Chinese American Archaeology (Chapter 5, Naruta 2006)

pages 178-222 of Naruta 2006

Investigating Social Identity Formation and Developing Chinese American Archaeology…………...………......178

Acculturation, Assimilation, and Essentialism………179

Ethnic Boundary Maintenance…………………………...…191

Ethnic Boundary Maintenance versus Racial Formation Processes…...……….196

A Practice Theory Approach…………………….....………197

Practice Theory and “Creating Whiteness” in California..…199

Moving away from Stereotypes in Archaeology of Chinese American Sites…………202

Developing Chinese American Archaeology.….........…...…208

Conclusion……………………………………………...…..218

Chapter 5: Investigating Social Identity Formation and Developing Chinese American Archaeology

The previous chapters demonstrate how contextually grounded data on the creation and uses of space allows insights into the processes by which racialized identities were created in California in the period following its annexation to the United States through the establishment of the Angel Island Immigration Station. Spatial data showing the histories of the creations of Chinatowns in five California cities refute the idea that white discrimination against Chinese Californians was the sole domain of unemployed workers. Instead, the manners in which land and other natural resources were linked to an emerging language of white entitlement demonstrate the leading roles of mainstream white politicians in these racial formation projects.

In this chapter I discuss the anthropological concepts of acculturation studies and ethnic boundary maintenance, and how they have been applied in archaeological practices. I analyze how the implementation of acculturation studies in archaeology of historic sites associated with Chinese Americans has frequently drawn on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century associations between the concepts of acculturation, assimilation, and cultural essentialism. I discuss developments in anthropological theory that points to the utility of approaches that examine the actual creations of social identity through acts of daily practice. To provide a fuller picture of the creation of whiteness in California I discuss data regarding historical landscapes and artifacts. Looking at the Anglo-American creation of “the Chinese race” enlarges anthropology’s call to rehistoricize social processes such as the creation of race by providing a case study outside a dichotomy of black and white. Finally, these theoretical orientations from practice theory and the re-historicization of anthropology join the enumeration of concrete practices allowing development of a robust Chinese American archaeology.

Acculturation, Assimilation, and Essentialism

In a recent article, Silliman (2004) traces the use of acculturation as an analytical approach in North American culture contact studies. Silliman (2004: 284) writes that acculturation studies initially arose “to explain why Indian peoples had not completely assimilated to mainstream United States culture, or melted into the pot, so to speak.” Silliman importantly draws our attention to the fact that acculturation studies developed in the context of a nineteenth and early twentieth-century focus on assimilation. Numerous scholars (e.g. Van West 1987; Takaki 1990; Almaguer 1994) emphasize how the idea behind assimilation was that people of various ethnicities would change their practices and world-views to become like “a modified English person” (Perry and Paynter 1999: 307). At the time, the goals of creating and maintaining the U.S. as a “homogeneous’ society” (Takaki 1990: 245) were expressed even more bluntly. Assimilation theory in social science developed in tandem with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “race science” that classified people into racial hierarchies with “Anglo-Saxon” whites at the very top (Harrison 1995: 50, 1998: 619; Smedley 1998: 694; see, for example 3rd International Eugenics Conference 1932). That other U.S. people should strive to resemble “Anglo-Saxons” in world-views and practices was an idea asserted throughout many mainstream white publications (Gutman 2000; see also Dolan DNA Learning Center n.d.), and perhaps one of its clearest expressions comes from an 1887 issue of a newspaper printed in colonial Hawai‘i. The Friend (August 1887) described Hawai‘i, Williams (2003: 23) writes, as an “‘Anglo-Saxonizing machine,’ comparable on a smaller scale to the United States as a ‘converter of all sorts of men into ultimate Englishmen.’” In Chapter 2, I discussed how the theme of making the U.S. more white was taken up as a conclusion of the Congressional Commission appointed to study U.S. immigration. When Commission member Jenks and co-author Lauck (1912) elaborated on the Commission’s findings in a popular book, The Immigration Problem, they concluded that for the best functioning of U.S. society, the ideal immigrants would be from England, followed by northwest Europe, and then by Southern Europe. The theme was that immigrants should be as close as possible to being of “Anglo-Saxon” blood, and the next best thing is that they should act like “Anglo-Saxons.” Van West (1987) writes of later nineteenth and twentieth-century “reformers” who believed many social problems could be solved by educating youth who were Native American, non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, and others, in isolated, architecturally-regular boarding schools patterned after the English boarding school system and the previous Spanish colonial missions. The goal of assimilation to middle-class Anglo-Saxon culture would be realized, wrote the federal Indian school superintendent in 1886, “only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents,” that is, his or her family, community, and anyone else able to communicate non-assimilated ideas and traditions (Prucha 1973: 194-195, quoted in Van West 1987: 93). Behaving in accord with the ideals of middle-class Anglo American culture was seen as the result of achieving “satisfactory” assimilation (Prucha 1973: 194-195, quoted in Van West 1987: 93; Gutman 2000; L. McClain 2001).

With the “race science” holding that character, mental, and moral development potentials were determined by race, there was tension between ideas about race and the idea that people from all cultures might be able to successfully assimilate. The history of the Chinese Exclusion movements shows how the charge that a particular “race” was incapable of assimilation was used in arguments for segregation and other differential treatments based on racial category (Healy and Chew 1905: iv). This view was shown in the Oakland Tribune’s (4 March 1882) reporting on the “Great Anti-Chinese Demonstration” that formed the response of many mainstream white Oaklanders to Governor Pardee’s proclamation of a holiday for demonstration in favor of Chinese Exclusion legislation. Extensive reporting of the demonstration included headlines editorializing about “China’s Non-assimilative Horde” and asserting, in explicitly racial terms, the “Difference Between Aryan and Mongolians” [sic]. Contemporary commentators (e.g. Baldwin 1890; Healy and Chew 1905: iv; Coolidge 1909) noted pro-segregation whites were alleging “the Chinese race” held a racial defect of being either unwilling to or incapable of assimilating.

Silliman (2004: 284) points out that it was in an attempt to provide a corrective reform to such tendencies to disparage groups for failing to “assimilate” that anthropologists formulated the study of acculturation. Silliman draws our attention to a programmatic formulation of the study of acculturation by Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits (1936: 149). These authors were explicit that acculturation, by definition, did not carry the meaning of assimilating to any particular standard of practices. Assimilation, they wrote, could be considered as a subset of acculturation, but acculturation itself was a broadly defined:

Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936: 149).

As Silliman observes, this definition of acculturation was a product of contemporary anthropological theory “stress[ing] bounded cultural groups adopting or rejecting cultural traits of other groups,” and so its conception of culture or ethnicity would seem overly normativizing and essentialist today (Jones 1997). However, the definition provides an important perspective of cultural relativism with the idea that acculturation had no natural direction, contrary to the assimilation into “civilization” Van West notes was the goal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century federal boarding schools for Native American youths. Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits also draw attention to the fact that in a culture contact situation, cultural influences are not necessarily unidirectional, but can affect everyone. The analytic neutrality of this 1936 definition of acculturation contrasts with its frequent application in archaeology, where it is often used in an attempt to assess assimilation “toward Euroamerican lifestyles and material culture” (Silliman 2004: 285, citing Cusick 1998; Rubertone 2000), and is particularly striking in light of the way archaeologists have operationalized the study of “acculturation” at historic sites associated with Chinese Americans. In these studies, the recovered material culture is often seen as a reflection—unless influenced by the “host” Anglo-American culture—of reified ideas about Chinese culture, a point to which I’ll return shortly.

Approaches to archaeologically investigating culture change under the ruberic of acculturation have varied. Farnsworth (1987) developed “Acculturation Profile Analysis,” in which ratios of material culture of various origins are compared to derive an indication of degree of acculturation. Farnsworth’s work occurred in the setting of archaeological investigations of Spanish colonial California missions, where padres had explicitly set out to transform the lifeways of Native Californians, with the support of military backup as well as transformations to the Western economic and demographic landscape that made the missionizing era, in the words of Milliken (1995), “a time of little choice.” In his “Acculturation Profile Analysis,” Farnsworth examined ratios of objects of material culture related to precolonial lifeways and Spanish colonial objects. He found materials with direct continuity with pre-colonial Native lifeways increased when padres in the mission system lessened their emphasis on indoctrinating mission Indians (Farnsworth 1987: 618). Farnsworth’s finding suggests that when diachronic analysis finds a change in style or source of material culture, it’s useful to investigate structural factors that may have enabled or contributed to the shift.

Wilkie and Farnsworth (1999) reexamined this approach to analyzing material culture in a study of the use of British ceramics at English colonial slave plantations in the Bahamas. With all the ceramics having been imported, largely from England, they focused how people may have been asserting social meanings through the designs they selected. Tracing the ceramic trade networks between England and the plantations under study, they found this a useful case study as this situation represented one in which “access to goods [was] least hindered” (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 314). They found that plantation owners used “expensive ceramics as a means to legitimate their authority” and make “statements about wealth and prestige” (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 287, 283). Looking at ceramics recovered from the living quarters of the Africans these plantation owners held in slavery, they found the “range of colors and decorative styles is not typical of European planter households, even though the ceramics are all of European origin” (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 313). The Africans enslaved at these plantations were selecting a greater proportion of hand-painted vessels and annual or mocha wares, and fewer transfer-printed wares, while, in comparison with the enslaved Africans, plantation slaveowners’ assemblages showed a greater preference for blue decorations (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 308, 313). Wilkie and Farnsworth focus on the meanings people may have been asserting through selecting particular items. Drawing on Giddens’ (1984) model of structuration and Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, Wilkie and Farnsworth (1999: 285) note that an influence on people’s choice of items of material culture may be whether those items look right, that is, whether they have design elements analogous to those on items with which the person is familiar. Wilkie and Farnsworth (1999: 309-310) suggest the execution of the banded (mocha) wares and even particular design elements of the hand-decorated wares had such resonance for the Africans enslaved at these plantations. In this way Wilkie and Farnsworth draw attention to the possibilities that people may have had different motivations for and intentions behind their selections from stocks of standardized goods.

Wilkie and Farnsworth also propose a functional explanation behind the ceramics selection observed in the archaeology of the slave quarters. They write that selection of ceramics with decorations most resonant to design elements found in West African motifs formed a way of creating a pan-ethnic African identity that functioned “to create and reinforce an identity that was different from the planter” and “to relieve [inter-ethnic] tensions” possibly present among “individuals from potentially hostile groups in the homeland” (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 315). The idea that people from different backgrounds would have experiences that influence how they view the same item is an important one. Perry and Paynter (1999: 303, citing Paynter 1992: 282) draw attention to Du Bois’ great-grandfather’s iron fire tongs carrying for him immense significance as a material connection with his African ancestry and the powerful spirituality connected with West African iron working (see also Hahn 1997; Russell 1997). The ways in which people enslaved on plantations created community has also been a research topic allowing productive examination of archaeological remains of different households (Thomas 1995). However, the anthropological focus on historicizing the concept of “race” and its origins in creating and perpetuating a stratified society based on racial slavery (R. Allen 1994, 1997; Harrison 1995, 1998; Smedley 1998) suggests that when it came to the creation of a shared, pan-ethnic group identity, a more significant unifying factor than the selection of decorative elements was the shared daily experiences of forced labor, the omnipresent threat of violent punishment, and systematic oppression (Smedley 1998: 694, 699). The newly formed system of slavery was different from previous forms of slavery, as previously discussed, not only in that it was race-based, but also that it was simultaneously creating “race” and racial hierarchies in its ideology and implementation. Such wide-ranging consequences of the creation and reinventions of racial categories suggest racial formation processes remain a significant avenue of research.

The original, nondirectional formulation of the anthropological concept of acculturation is striking to those who have read many of the later twentieth-century of archaeological studies of “acculturation” at historic sites associated with Chinese Americans. The study of “acculturation” has instead been implemented as the study of “assimilation.” To understand this it is useful to compare Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits’ (1936: 149) definition with a recent definition typical of acculturation studies of archaeological sites related to Chinese Americans. Here again is the 1936 formulation:

Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups.

The following definition is typical of archaeology at sites associated with historic Chinese American populations: Acculturation, Staski writes (1993: 128), is a process “which eliminates particular behavioral patterns which serve to identify those who are within or without the ethnic population” (Staski 1993: 128). Here “acculturation” is viewed as a process in which an “ethnic” group eliminates its distinctive “behavioral patterns.” Such definitions rely on an idea of “mainstream” behavior that is a normative assumption rather than actuality. The unarticulated premise is that “mainstream” behavior is white middle-class behavior, or rather a normative idea of what that might be, feeding into a perpetuation of what Harrison (1995: 48) points out are “the conventionally neglected configurations of whiteness.”

Such acculturation studies tend to view material culture recovered at sites associated with Chinese Americans in one of two ways: either the material culture reflects influences of the “host” Anglo-American culture, or it reflects ideas about a timeless, relatively monolithic “Chinese culture.” I’ll return to the latter topic. In an example of the former view, Staski (1993: 130, 141-142) looks at alcohol consumption of “the Chinese of El Paso” by comparing ratios of liquor bottles to other artifact classes, and contrasts it with “non-Chinese culture of the western frontier.” Faunal remains from the Chinese community are interpreted as indicating “the dominant dietary regime was influencing Chinese patterns” (1993: 140). “The dominant dietary regime,” like “non-Chinese culture,” is simply “Euroamerican.” That “Euroamerican” practices are taken as the standard ignores that the areas under study are truly “multicultural” (Staski 1993: 125). Rather than looking to see how practices prevalent among a particular group align with an unarticulated “Euroamerican” or white standard, it would be more productive to consider how people in a pluralistic social setting are experiencing not only exchanges of influences but participating in “the construction of New World creole identities” (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 283), formulations of new ways of life in new geographic, economic, and social cultural settings.

Especially when the populations under study were composed mostly of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, as was widely the case for California during the study period, thinking about those populations in terms of creolization underscores other imperatives for studying material culture. In their investigation of the Chinese district that formed as part of Sacramento in the Gold Rush period, Praetzellis and Praetzellis (1997: 295) discuss banquets that a number of major Chinese merchants gave for other prominent businessmen and public officials in the 1850s and 1860s, where, as in one instance described by the Sacramento Bee (7 December 1861), they treated them to “a 26-course Chinese meal, which subtly fused Chinese food and environment with the familiar symbols of Euroamerican popular culture” such as table settings and champagne (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 295). Fragments of English Willow-patterned ceramics recovered from deposits associated with these Chinese merchants are interpreted as having been items “from the local popular culture” used “for display” at such relations-building events (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 289). Praetzellis and Praetzellis (1997: 295) suggest that while the ceramics were British, in these settings they were being used in a “decidedly Asian” strategy. Praetzellis and Praetzellis’ drawing attention to the possible transformations of meanings of items of material culture is important. Looking from a perspective of creolization—a perspective that may have had even more prevalence at the time, before Chinese Exclusion legislation endorsed and codified an idea that Chinese Americans were “less desirable” than Anglo Americans—we could go even further with interpretation of the Chinese merchants’ owning British transfer printed ceramics. Rather than say the merchants were using British ceramics in a Chinese way, we might look at how the dishes formed part of the vocabulary available to Sacramentans, a society of which they were a part.

The second archaeological practice I mentioned as frequently occurring in studies of sites associated with Chinese Americans is employing an idea of a timeless, relatively monolithic “Chinese culture,” and interpreting actions of Chinese American individuals as a reflection of a Chinese essence. This practice is not unique to this topic, and its use in archaeology more generally has been adeptly critiqued by Jones (1997) and Joyce and Hendon (2000). A notable example of how it occurs in investigating sites associated with Chinese Americans is in archaeologists’ interpretations of architecture. For example, Sisson (1993: 55) looks at “the average area of [known historic] Chinese dwellings” in Idaho and in Australia in an attempt to derive an overall “average area of Chinese dwellings” that can be used to identify a given structure of unknown origin as Chinese. For Sisson (1993: 59), it’s only technical difficulties that impair deriving the Chinese “type”: “Whether Chinese structures are always windowless,” he writes, “is difficult to determine since most structures [in the study area] have deteriorated.” Greenwood (1993: 384-385, 395) notes the prevalence of essentialist assumptions in archaeology of Chinese American sites, and observes the existence of a fad for interpretations that are actually explanations based on ideas about feng shui (e.g. Mueller 1987; Sisson 1993: 59). Greenwood points out that low-cost vernacular architecture, for example, is in general more often shaped by expediency over other design factors, and that the construction (or selection) of other buildings takes place in a particular network of social and economic conditions.

Another analytical trope by which archaeologists have expressed an idea of a timeless, essential Chineseness is the practice of comparing artifacts recovered from deposits from widely varying time periods and geographic areas as if they were equivalent. A dramatic illustration of this practice comes from a study by Blanford (1987). He examines the physical attributes of bottles recovered from sites where Chinese Americans had lived over a geographical range from Southern California to Northern California and Nevada. The assemblages come from deposits with a 100-year time span, from the Gold-Rush era Chinese district of Sacramento, to 1930s Riverside. Blanford (1987: 212) makes no reference to the temporal contexts of the assemblages, but runs a cluster analysis among all the assemblages to see which group of bottle attributes reflect “a Chinese ethnic bottle pattern.” Ignoring the contemporary contexts, such as international and local supply networks, economics, and fashions, leaves the analysis only able to produce statements about a timeless, “relatively homogeneous” Chineseness. While this example is stark, it highlights the problem of analytically viewing deposits of different time periods as directly comparable because they are “Chinese” (also Greenwood 1993: 389). A related issue is making statements about “the Chinese” from single deposits with broad date ranges. Interpreting a deposit dating as broadly as fifty years, for example, from the 1880s to the 1930s (e.g. Langenwalter and Langenwalter 1987), tends towards an interpretation of timeless essentialism, and begs the question of understanding how people’s lives were shaped by and interacted with changes experienced during eras of war, recessions, fashions, increasing mass marketing, and the industrial revolution, among others. Chapter 3’s graphical representation of the excavation samples from the four most extensive samplings of California Chinatown sites shows that even with the significant results archaeological excavations have been able to produce, the actual total sample is quite small. Greenwood (1993: 393) notes that “controlled excavation of intact or sealed, identifiable, datable features is still the exception.” Further archaeological excavations are required to enlarge the archaeological sample enough to allow comparisons between different sites of the same period, or study of changes over time in one locality.

Additionally, a technical aspect of how data is analyzed and reported can also address the need to avoid unwarranted generalizations. Basic statistical comparisons, such as how representative a vessel type is of a whole collection, are often formulated when the sample size, such as nine objects, is far too small to enable such statements. It will be important for archaeologists to work with methods more capable of accurately representing the complexity of a particular deposit. Recent research is exploring representation methods that might be more useful to archaeologists. Figure 5-1, reproducing a figure from Van Bueren et al.’s (2004) work in West Oakland, shows a method of representing the date ranges of recovered glass and ceramic artifacts that simultaneously grounds the viewer in an understanding of the actual material behind the assessments. Archaeologists will need to continue to derive both site-specific and generalizable approaches to numerical and visual representations that provide a means of evaluating the degree of confidence behind summary and comparative statements.

Ethnic Boundary Maintenance

Following work that focused on how symbolically-communicative objects might be brought into play in a process of mobilizing group identity (Hodder 1982; Conkey 1991: 13; see also Jones 1997: 110, 116), many archaeologists investigating historic sites associated with Chinese Americans changed focus from investigating acculturation (c.f. LSA Associates, Inc. 2003: 214) to investigating a population’s degree of ethnic boundary maintenance. This research question was designed to take into account the fluid nature of social identities and the active roles individuals have in their creation (e.g. R. Allen, et al. 2002: 82). Yet the concept of ethnic boundary maintenance has not shed theoretical baggage from acculturation studies. “Ethnic boundary maintenance” assumes an “ethnic boundary” to be maintained. The theoretical assumptions that underlie this conception are not explained. It seems at least to assume there were “bounded, monolithic territorial entities” from which these now interacting persons derived, drawing on what Jones (1997: 110) notes may be a vestigial legacy from nineteenth-century taxonomic systems. Ethnic boundary maintenance is often operationalized as the degree to which ethnically typical practices are enacted in a situation, for example, whether butchering is done by cleaver or by saw. A slight rephrasing of the ethnic boundary maintenance question, such as investigating the “degree of ethnicity operative” (Brott and Mueller 1987b: 438), makes clear the underlying assumption of seeing individuals actions as “a reflection of some essence,” despite the refinement of seeing a subject choosing to enact or repress to a greater or lesser degree some portion of his or her ethnicity. The essential ethnic category is assumed, and the only question is the degree to which it is made manifest in opposition to another.

A simple example shows how in practice, the ethnic boundary maintenance research frame often slips into viewing behavior as a reflection of some essence. Excavation in Sacramento recovered the contents of a late 1870s to early 1880s pit associated with the “[white] working class tenants” of a Mrs. Washburn (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 68). From this pit there were recovered three fragments of “Chinese tableware,” 12 fragments, for a minimum number of nine vessels, of “non-Chinese ceramics,” and an additional 48 fragments (MNI 14) that were “undecorated,” and presumably of indeterminate origin (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 88). The archaeologists wrote the three fragments of Chinese ceramics were “chance occurrences and were probably not deposited by the household(s) responsible for the remainder of the collection” (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 68).

In interpreting a deposit, it is valid and necessary to report if evidence, such as geomorphological characteristics of the deposit or an intrusively later artifact, indicates that deposit has experienced mixing with another (e.g. Schulz 1997: 258). The archaeologists do not indicate this is the case. Neither does it seem that the conclusion that the Chinese ceramics were “chance occurrences” can be determined from numerical evidence: Chinese ceramics comprised three of the 15 fragments of identified origins. It seems instead that the evaluation that the Chinese ceramic fragments “were probably not deposited by the household(s) responsible for the remainder of the collection” is due to those households not having been Chinese. If the research design’s theme is to investigate how artifacts were used in the creation and maintenance of boundaries between groups (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 24-5, 30), it has in this instance been preempted by the assumption of an automatic correlation between an ethnicity and a given artifact, explaining away evidence that might speak to the process under investigation.

I choose this example from Praetzellis and Praetzellis because their work is also attentive to looking at how contextual data provides the material necessary to deriving interpretations that go beyond deterministic assumptions. Praetzellis and Praetzellis (1997, 1982) join other archaeologists in pointing out evidence establishing that archaeologists would be foolish to draw equations of European ceramics = white person, Chinese ceramics = Chinese person. They note Sacramento’s Chinese Bazaar was reported by the Sacramento Daily Bee as a source of “tokens of love and friendship…rare and beautiful specimens of the handicrafts of the Flowery Kingdom” (10 December 1860, quoted in Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 166). By 1852 the Sacramento Daily Union had observed the Chinatown “has grown more than ever in importance … thousands of persons throng it daily” (8 November 1852, quoted in Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 96). A late 1800s photo of Oakland’s fourth City Hall (Figure 5-2) shows it decked out in for celebration in palm fronds, yards of patriotically-themed bunting and U.S. flags, and scores of Asian-style paper lanterns ringing the upper and lower stories. Strung out along the perimeter, a line of paper lanterns decorated with large U.S. flags further suggests interconnectedness in economic and other relations. An example indicating how artifacts of Chinese origin might abound in a white household comes from the household of Oakland Mayor and State Senator Enoch Pardee’s son, George C. Pardee. Following service as Oakland’s Mayor from 1893-1895, George C. Pardee was in 1902 elected to be Governor of California, and in 1903 the Sacramento Bee (quoted in Nicolai 2003: 7) described some of the new First Lady’s actions:

In March, Mrs. Pardee and Mrs. Alden Anderson, wife of the lieutenant-governor, hosted a Chinese card party at the Pardees’ temporary residence. The two hostesses dressed in kimonos and decorated their hair with little fans; Chinese score cards, Chinese money, Chinese refreshments, incense, sandlewood tapers and scores of lanterns – all added to the festive theme.

Bilingual English and Chinese language cookbooks aided some Chinese cooks in preparing dishes such as those a white employer might request a live-in cook to prepare for the household’s table (Fat Ming Co. 1910; see also Longone 2004). Non-Chinese cooks who wanted to try their hand at dishes they might have sampled at Chinese restaurants could by 1914 use the English-language Chinese-Japanese Cook Book co-authored by Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna. The wide use of Chinese goods was not a new phenomenon; from the 1700s onward residents of the pre-U.S. colonies were buying large quantities of low-cost Chinese ceramics for everyday use (Goldstein 1984; see also Greenwood 1996: 65, 85). Chinese ceramics comprised portions of ceramics recovered at Spanish missions of turn-of-the-1800s California, and excavations at the French colonial site of Old Mobile, Alabama, recovered portions of Chinese porcelain archaeologists described as of a quality equivalent to European princely collections (Shulsky 2002). Clearly archaeologists have demonstrated the identity of the former owner or user of an artifact cannot be derived from the origin of the artifact.

Artifacts recovered from Chinatown excavations likewise indicate interconnectedness in a global economy. Each of the archaeological investigations in Chapter 3 indicated Chinatown residents routinely purchased household and food goods from local and national manufacturers. Ceramics imported from Europe—and especially Great Britain—have been found in every excavated California Chinatown, and ceramics bearing maker’s marks of U.S. attribution are significantly represented (R. Allen et al. 2002: 139, 148; Greenwood 1996: 84-5, 142, 165-9). The archaeological findings of economic interconnectedness add to other evidence standing in direct opposition to accusations Chinese Californians contributed nothing to the U.S. economy.

Yet the origin of the object does not explain its role in social relations. Hellman and Yang (1997: 199) make an important point in their analysis of Sacramento Chinatown artifacts. One artifact category they examine is Chinese coins with a square hole in the middle, tongbao: more than thirty were recovered, the vast majority bearing dates of the 18th and 17th centuries. Hellman and Yang importantly do not speculate on the meaning of these coins in Sacramento, and instead emphasize that the way people there were using tongbao would have to be derived from further contextual research, including “firm association with other artifacts.” It’s no minor point, and extends further into the domain of the ethnic boundary maintenance research focus; examining the possible meanings behind a California consumer choosing ceramic tableware from a manufacturer in China or in Great Britain requires first building some degree of understanding at multiple scales about the trade contexts that made those vessels available to that locality, and the associations about those vessels and their decoration that may have had currency at the time. The emphasis on examining items contextually also extends to examining artifacts always with reference to deposits from which they were recovered (e.g. Schulz 1997: 258, 2000: 2), and these practices aid in preventing unwarranted essentializing assumptions about a population that eviscerate the actual intent behind the concept of ethnic boundary maintenance, to investigate how people used objects in creating social identities.

Ethnic boundary maintenance begins at a starting point that hinders the investigator, one that has to assume the existence of bounded, discrete ethnic categories (c.f. Jones 1997). As these ethnic categories become “Chinese” versus “non-Chinese,” “Chinese” versus “Euro American,” or “Chinese” versus “white,” the ethnic categories are also racialized, bringing more than a hundred and fifty years of historical baggage about the characteristics of each group to testing “ethnic boundary maintenance.”

Ethnic boundary maintenance versus racial formation processes

Before proceeding, it’s worth clarifying how the concepts of racial formation processes and ethnic boundary maintenance differ. Like Bell (2005), Omi and Winant (1986) note the salient aspects of racial formation processes are that an in-group identity is created in opposition to the “Other.” The intentional goal of those engaging in racial formation processes is building an idea of group solidarity in opposition to others in order to gain unequal access to resources. Looking at the formation and spread of the Chinese Exclusions movements demonstrates that there were European Americans who were promoting ideas about “Chineseness” as a way to create an essentialized white identity, one that would subsume a number of ethnic identities and nationalities, as part of attempts to arrange industrial, mining, and other commercial ventures to their own profit. Rather than there being an already extant, culturally-based ethnic boundary that could be maintained or modified, a number of individuals were inventing a “racial” boundary, a color line.

A Practice Theory Approach

A practice theory approach provides a useful alternative to essentialized notions of identity. It holds that it is in daily actions, or practices, that people create individual and group identities (Bourdieu 1973, 1977; see also Jones 1997). Pauketat (2001: 87) describes some of the analytical advantages of this orientation:

The idea of practice focuses attention on the creative moments in time and space where change was actually generated. This generative process assumes no essentialist organizations, institutions, or belief systems, but is located instead in microscale actions and representations.

The interpretative power of looking at practices is not limited to the microscale, Pauketat notes, since “depending on the context of the practices, microscale processes exist simultaneously at macroscales as well.” Pauketat argues process of “domination, transculturation, communalization, creolization, and ethnogenesis” are among the macroscale processes that are illuminated by examining the microscale practices of which they are comprised.

In a reconsideration of archaeological approaches to ethnicity, Jones (1997) emphasizes that ethnicity is created through the actions people take in relation to one another. Bourdieu (1973) provides an example of how practices can be explicitly formulated to shape identity, describing how infants in Berber society are moved through a house in an explicit and overt effort to create the child’s individual and group identity. Bourdieu’s example shows how material objects—in this case architecture—are often involved in the social production of individual and group identities (Hendon 2000, after Bourdieu 1977, Pred 1990, Giddens 1993, Moore 1996; Joyce 2000). That material objects are often involved in such activities, and that the practices by definition are repeated, makes this orientation particularly amenable to archaeological investigation (Wilkie and Farnsworth 1999: 285). A practice theory orientation allows for empirically investigating social interactions, to examine if and how people in pluralistic societies grouped themselves and expressed affiliations. Archaeologists researching pluralistic societies, such as the one built at California’s Fort Ross by Native Alaskans, Native Californians, and Russians (e.g. Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998), are finding important avenues for research are opened up by focusing on the spatial organization people created, used, and modified through their daily actions and interactions. The attention to people’s enactments of spaces simultaneously provides the context needed to be able to interpret artifactual finds as they may have been used and in relation to their contemporary significance.

A practice theory approach to interpreting the archaeological remains of Chinatowns provides a number of benefits. Examining the daily practices through which people created and shaped their material and social words, as Pauketat (2001) notes, avoids imposing assumptions of essentialized identity. Further, since archaeology can investigate changes in practices over time, this approach is particularly suited to making sure ethnic identity is not “perceived as hereditary, permanent, and unalterable,” a problem Smedley (1998: 700) notes was exacerbated by the creation of “racial science.” Instead, focusing on daily practices allows understanding processes of identity formation ranging from creolization to racial formation projects. Pauketat (2001:87) observes that investigating questions of identity formation, culture change, and other social phenomena can only be made possible through “the cumulative, painstaking, data-rich, multiscalar studies of proximate causation,” or historical events. Pauketat (2001:73-74) identifies such investigations as part of a new paradigm emerging in archaeology, “historical processualism,” and emphasizes that such investigations have particular imperatives for what data is sought and how it is collected. I’ll return to relevant issues in applying such an approach in archaeological study of historic Chinatowns.

Practice theory and “creating whiteness” in California

Examining daily practices makes concrete what may seem to be abstract processes, the creation of whiteness and the creation of racism. In Chapter 1, I discussed Bell’s (2005) archaeological study of how Anglo-American slaveowners in colonial Virginia worked to create a sense of white identity and solidarity through establishing spaces that emphasized intimacy when visiting with their fellow Anglo-American slaveowners, and asserting difference with the African Americans they held in slavery through adopting architectural forms that imposed separation between the slaveowners’ living quarters and the work sites necessary to maintain their households. Looking at material culture and the organization of spaces provides dramatic examples of how a white identity linked with racial discrimination was promoted in the period leading up to and following the enactment of Chinese Exclusion legislation. Californian children of the 1870s and later grew up in an environment that provided them frequent illustrations of casual harassment of and actual violence against Chinese Americans. An 1878 Pacific Tourist newspaper illustration reproduced in Farkas (1998: 9) shows a typical example: white boys and young men are shown lounging outside a building, watching while one of their number kicks a Chinese American man. While such acts were never represented as exemplary behavior, members of mainstream white society and government did not act to stop these common occurrences. Instead, the harassers were encouraged by declarations of the hierarchical “difference between Aryan and Mongolians” (Oakland Tribune, 4 March 1882), popular newspaper illustrations declaring a “war of the races” (Keller 1880, in Choy, Dong, and Hom 1994: 130), and the legal statement that Chinese should be excluded from the United States. In tandem with the later nineteenth-century halt of Reconstruction, establishment of Chinese Exclusion, and U.S. military activity in the Pacific, representations and acts creating a sense of white identity posited as superior to those who were non-white increased (Du Bois 1935; Choy, Dong, and Hom 1994; Ignacio et al. 2004), and such representations were often brought into the daily lives of children. One example is found in the archived papers of George C. Perkins’ political protegee, Frederick T. Stratton (1900-1917b), which contain an early 1900s album an adult made for a child. The items selected and pasted in the pages include printed illustrations and line drawings that can be colored. One image the adult included for the child is a 1908 drawing of a young African American girl dressed in a high-style beribboned frock. Standing shoeless and holding a parasol, she also holds a leash, at the end of which is a muzzled alligator. The caption reads “miss pickaninny snowball: ‘i’s gwine to have a poodle-dog, same as white folks!’” From childhood onwards, then, many white people were being presented with racialized representations that encouraged racial stereotyping, racism, and racial discrimination. That children would be presented with such images as part of adults’ nurturing and caring acts likely increased their effect.

Examining historical spatial organizations of five California cities also reveals practices enacting the creation of whiteness in California. Chapters 3 and 4 described how in Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Oakland, city residents of Chinatowns were forced to undergo the expense and disruption of relocating homes and businesses, sometimes repeatedly, and, as in Oakland, even being pushed out of locations that had been designated “official” Chinatowns. The historical data shows these actions were part of a classic racial formation project: The dislocations were initiated by white city authorities and other business interests poised to redevelop area land, and evidence shows those who agitated for the dislocation often hoped to reap a financial reward from the new land use. In the previous chapters I discussed how building support for the dislocation projects involved creating and activating a public discourse which emphasized symbols of ingroup and outgroup—“white” and not-white—and assigned to the outgroup characteristics of “nuisance” and “blight,” asserted to be an inherent part of the outgroup’s essential nature. Attempting to build public support for a dislocation project by creating stereotypes of targeted residents and claiming properties to be a blight is a pattern already documented in Groth’s (1994: 282, 274-7) history of residential hotels in the U.S., and data from the present study joins that from Chow (1974) to suggest that the definition of “blight” as it relates to property may in fact have been first developed in racially-discriminatory application to Chinese Americans, by whites who wanted to reconfigure the built environment. Dislocation projects enacted the language of white entitlement, and sought to give it physical form in placement of buildings in the landscape. We see racial formation processes often had a very material venue. The historical creations and uses of spaces may be a major research question in understanding California Chinatowns, through allowing research that illuminates how in particular instances people interacted and created social identity in pluralistic social settings.

Moving away from stereotypes in archaeology of Chinese American sites

Recent work by Fong (2005b, 2005c) highlights the need for archaeologists to continually be aware of the potential of legacies of 19th century stereotypes to influence current archaeological practices. (It’s also worth noting archaeologist of Neolithic Europe Conkey [1997] emphasizes that the issue of available stereotypes influencing archaeological practices and interpretations is a wider problem, one not unique to archaeologists working with Chinese American sites.) Such issues can be ameliorated with developing more of the context needed for accurately analyzing archaeological assemblages. Below I address two of the areas that require fuller historical contextual study, ceramic analysis and dietary studies. I then discuss a third topic, the fascination shown by a number of archaeologists excavating sites associated with Chinese Americans with the topic of opium use and opium paraphernalia. Archaeological practices in this area especially have tended towards employing reified ideas about Chineseness, and through a preoccupation with opium have mistaken nineteenth-century anti-Chinese stereotypes for people’s actual practices.

Ceramic analysis

Ceramic analysis is one area in which many current interpretative practices actually hinder analysis, and where fuller contextual information is urgently required. Currently, it is common to analytically divide ceramic assemblages into “Chinese” and “Euro American” sherds. This introduces a number analytical stumbling blocks. If these categories are meant to refer to populations most commonly associated with using such ceramics, then the labels are conclusions relating to purchase, use, and even social significance, rather than actual attributes of the individual ceramic fragments. If the categories “Chinese” and “Euro American” are meant to refer to the origin of the ceramics, then they are not equivalent categories. The majority of the “Euro American” ceramics were reported to have been manufactured in English, France, and Germany. Referring to ceramics manufactured in the U.S. as “Euro American” again introduces assumptions about race or ethnicity of the makers. While analysis of most European ceramics and ceramics from U.S. manufacturers is aided by decades of studies of the potters and much contextual information about their advertisement, U.S. archaeologists have not pursed equivalent data about Chinese manufacturers. Greenwood (1993: 390) notes the paucity of contextually-oriented studies on these ceramics, a gap whose persistence has perhaps been facilitated by institutional and historical preference among specialists in Asian ceramics for studying exceptional objects rather than the most common and vernacular wares.

Stenger (1993) illustrates one way in which the lack of data on ceramics hinders interpretation. In a study of ceramics that examined the effectiveness of using elemental analysis to aid in determining the sources and temporal associations of ceramics found on Overseas Chinese sites in the Pacific Northwest, she discovered what archaeologists had considered assemblages of Chinese ceramics on reexamination turned out to usually be comprised of three types of Chinese wares and four types from Japan (Stenger 1993: 328). (Marks on Japanese vessels allowed independent confirmation of this sourcing.) This is not to argue spectrographic analysis solves the problem, any more than we would depend on spectrographic analysis to understand British ceramics from a nineteenth-century site. Rather, Stenger’s study emphasizes the need for conducting documentary research able to provide context for the sherds archaeologically recovered. Substantial work is required in identifying manufacturers, their business connections, trade networks and routes, and, once in U.S. wholesale and retail contexts, the local availabilities of various products, and the contemporary network of significations available to a particular object. Greenwood (1993: 393) also adds the necessity of developing information about the pottery works at which the vessels were made. The contextual frameworks created by these studies will allow significant data-based interpretations of these assemblages.

Dietary studies

With paleoethnobotannical analysis—including flotation samples, pollen samples, and other techniques designed to recover plant remains—becoming routine in archaeological investigations, I anticipate there will also be reorientations to the interpretation of dietary practices. Fong (2005b, 2005c) notes the problems introduced in archaeologists taking contemporary market availability and eating habits as indicators of past practices, as it tends towards a lack of historicity. Additionally, an analytical focus on the meat likely represented by archaeologically recovered faunal remains, its equivalent market value, and subsequent inferences about socio-economic status introduces a neutral-seeming ethnocentric bias against cultural preferences for a diet based on fish, vegetables, and rice. That being “particularly fond” of vegetables was a practice an 1875 Oakland Tribune (13 March) article agitating for the removal of the San Pablo Avenue Chinatown named to draw a contrast between Chinese and whites. This highlights that the normatively-construed “European American” dietary practices used for comparison have often been insufficiently scrutinized. That is, the dietary practices and meanings should be contextually investigated, rather than being taken as normative human practices. As dietary practices are further investigated, they will be perhaps reconceptualized; for example, we might examine what influences on local dietary practices among Californians of European descent were exercised by the European myths of the dangers of fresh fruits—a belief enduring enough to be marshaled in explaining the death of President Zachary Taylor—and how those beliefs may have been enacted or modified in settings including both new physical environments and a cosmopolitan, pluralistic social setting.

Opium: Breaking an Archaeological Addiction

Lack of adequate primary source research can facilitate perpetuating stereotypes, and one example that shows the subsequent pervasive strength of nineteenth-century stereotypes is the repeated association of Chinese people and opium consumption. The degree to which opium has grabbed the imagination of archaeologists working with Overseas Chinese sites is well indicated by Fong’s (2005b: 27; 2005c) observation that nearly 14% of the Great Basin Foundation archaeological report’s five-hundred-page volume two (1987b) focuses on opium and opium paraphernalia. Available data demonstrates this great a representation of opium in a discussion of a historical Chinatown is a reflection not of a prevalence of the drug among Chinese Americans, but rather the historical endurance of stereotypes about Chinese and opium. Instead of taking up the stereotypes, it’s important to consider how opium was used in the realm of daily practices, in what quantities, and by whom; voluminous data (e.g. ARU 2001; Orlins 1982: 18-9; Sando and Felton 1993: 169; Wylie and Higgins 1987: 358) indicates the primary consumers of opium in the United States were “white” European Americans, who were involved with opium to the degree that some even ventured into trying to commercially farm it (Wylie and Higgins 1987: 358). Opium possession remained legal until 1914 (Sando and Felton 1993: 169), and a opium preparations could even be ordered from the national mailorder vendor Sears, Roebuck and Co., under the category of “Family Remedies” that are “Simple, Useful, Necessary, and Known to Everyone” (Roebuck and Co. 1897: n.p.). White European American memoirs (e.g. DeQuincy 2003[1821]) show picking up opium at a neighborhood pharmacy was nothing out of the ordinary.

The association of Chinese with opium, a British colonial product, was a stereotype given a lot of play in the popular press (e.g. Yeager 1883, reproduced in Choy, Dong, and Hom 1994: 107), perpetuated by fictional “memoirs” white authors pretended had been written by Chinese Americans (Eng and Grant 1930; see also Chan et al. 1991), and reinforced by sensationalistic tours a visitor to San Francisco Chinatown could take of what were fake opium dens (Asbury 1933: 171; Whitfield 1947: 51-3; Miller 1901: 787). The stereotyped association of opium and Chinese Americans was further created and reinforced through a set of staged opium den photos available for purchase around the turn of the century (Cook 1889). When I viewed a set of these photos, collected into a policeman’s voluminous set of scrapbooks, they were grouped with shots of the San Francisco Police Department’s new China Town Squad staging a photo of breaking into an opium den, and then posing for a group photo with the axe as a prop. In these demonstrations of how they were “getting tough on crime,” the police department was drawing on and perpetuating the stereotypes that associated opium with Chinese Americans.

To keep speaking of opium as something inherently related to Chinese Californians is to allow nineteenth-century stereotypes to seep in to investigations otherwise capable of producing independent data. To bring up opium each time a historic site associated with Chinese Americans is considered—such as happened with a recent research design that a priori included the goal of comparing opium consumption at an as-yet uninvestigated Chinatown with that at other Chinatowns (Pastron and Vanderslice 2005a: 80)—enacts what Orser (1998: 662; also Babson 1990) criticized as “reifying ethnic identity through association with specific artifacts or artifact classes” due to a lack of actual empirical inquiry, and ignoring “the ways in which racist beliefs have defined identity in relations of power.”

Further, the archaeological focus on opium consumption may also be indicating our naiveté about nineteenth-century life and drug use. Cocaine was then a widely available product, consumed in preparations such as the beverage Coca-Cola, which featured cocaine from 1886 until about 1906 (ARU 2001; General Science Archive 1999; Pendergrast 2000); or in cocaine and wine mixtures like Vin Vitae (Sears, Roebuck and Co. 1909: 380); Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s own brand, Peruvian Wine of Coca (1897: n.p.); or the tonic “for overworked men, delicate women, [and] sickly children,” Vin Mariani, avidly consumed by world leaders including President McKinley (San Francisco Call, 30 November 1898; Pendergrast 2000). Cocaine-containing throat lozenges were advertised as “indispensable for singers, teachers, and orators” (ARU 2001). Other consumer products, like Burnett’s Cocoaine for the Hair, did not contain actual cocaine, but hoped to link their product with the positive properties with which cocaine was being widely associated (ARU 2001; Van Bueren 2004: 49, 56). Cocaine and narcotic products were then quite ordinary in nineteenth-century life. To avoid perpetuating old stereotypes, research questions involving opium consumption will require contextual examination of drug use for populations throughout the United States.

Developing Chinese American Archaeology

In discussing practice theory and the re-historicizing of anthropological theory, Pauketat (2001: 87) argues that investigating questions of identity formation, culture change, and other social phenomena can only be made possible through “the cumulative, painstaking, data-rich, multiscalar studies of proximate causation,” or linked historical events. Pauketat (2001: 73-74) demonstrates that such investigations have particular imperatives for what data is sought and how it is collected. In this section I enumerate how some of these data-gathering imperatives translate into archaeological investigations of Chinatowns. In doing so I have two purposes. First, as the overall archaeological sample of Chinatown sites is as yet very small, it is an especially opportune time to revisit what data is necessary to enable practice-theory orientated investigations of historic Chinatowns.

The second purpose has to do with the fact that nearly all archaeological investigations of historic sites associated with Chinese Americans have occurred in a compliance archaeology setting (Greenwood 1993), and continuing redevelopment argues this will continue to be the case. If some of the archaeological data-gathering imperatives I enumerate seem to be the basic stuff of an introductory textbook, it is worth asking why they are rarely followed in compliance archaeology at historic sites associated with Chinese Americans. While my earlier discussion of archaeological projects at the historic Chinatowns of Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Riverside may have created an impression to the contrary, looking at the fuller record of compliance archaeology shows that archaeologists following practices that ensure adequate treatment of cultural resources in compliance projects are the exception rather than the rule. As redevelopment will continue to impact historic Chinatown sites, my second purpose in enumerating basic standards for such archaeological research is as an aid to City Planning officials who have to make decisions about what constitutes legally-adequate study of a site that is otherwise about to be destroyed. In California, the Certified Local Government System means many city planning departments can take over the oversight role of the State Historic Preservation Officer. As few cities have archaeologists on staff or as a member of the Landmarks board, the plan for an archaeological remediation of a significant site may be approved without City oversight by anyone with archaeological training (Oakland City Council 2004). The level of standards of the archaeological mitigation, then, depend in large part only on the practices of the archaeological contractor. The developer’s choice tends to be the lowest bidder, and unfortunately, the record of previous investigations makes clear that a number of practices that have been employed in investigating historic Chinatown areas fail to allow archaeologists to conduct archaeological study capable of recovering adequate information. Examples from compliance-driven historical archaeology demonstrate that such practices as placing all reliance on understanding an area through Sanborn maps and only secondary and tertiary sources will perhaps always fail—biases that may have left some populations underrepresented in historical narratives are likely to be perpetuated—and neither research goals nor legal regulations will be met. The corollary is that archaeologically investigating such sites requires first conducting substantial amounts of research with primary documents. Particular attention must be paid to establishing the landuse history and context of an area. While these practices are basic standards for any site, when the situation is compliance archaeology at Chinese American sites, these practices are prerequisite to achieve adequate treatment of potentially legally-significant archaeological remains as defined by the California Environmental Quality Act or Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. Below I expand on the particular reasons why this is necessary.

Pre-excavation study

A number of conditions create the necessity for archaeological investigation to conduct extensive primary document research prior to design and implementation of the excavation plan. Marginal areas, such as the shores of sloughs in Oakland, Sacramento (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1997: 274, 17-8; Minnick 1988: 12), and Stockton (Minnick 2002: 10, 1988: 28-40), were often made use of by Chinese Californians and others during cities’ early histories, and the development of these areas is frequently poorly known. Subsequent development that radically alters the landscape can create for the modern-day observer the misleading impression the area’s development has been straightforward and available summary histories of city development are applicable. Additionally, archaeologists working with what seem to be comprehensive primary sources find that systematic or opportunistic omissions were frequently made. Examples range from the failure of official lease books in early Sacramento to have recorded any Chinese surnames, to the careful selection of aspects to be represented in what were essentially honorific or promotional depictions, such as illustrated city histories and bird’s eye views (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 22, 13, 16, 1997: 18-9, 34).

Substantial pre-excavation study is also required to build sufficient understanding of the development of an area’s infrastructure. The histories of roads, water service, and sewage systems, for example, will often provide needed data that speaks to the social history of a city. Researchers have contributed to documenting how the timing and placement of city infrastructure is often intertwined with political goals (e.g. Greenwood 1996: 16-7; Schlereth 1989; Chow 1974; Battle 1998). Further, available data about historic projects to displace Chinatowns shows these efforts were often accompanied by reconfigurations of city infrastructure. Archaeologists working in a particular context must therefore be sure to understand how new road construction or widening may have impacted neighborhoods and communities. Conversely, such infrastructure changes may indicate a population was being dislocated, and can point to areas where research is needed.

In tandem with extensive pre-excavation documentary study, information about the development of city infrastructure will often need to be derived from excavation data. Archaeologist Van Bueren (2004: 119-23) has demonstrated developing this information often requires examining archaeological deposits for which there has not been discovered named household associations. This indicates great potential interpretative significance of deposits that contracting firms often pass over or discard.

Pre-excavation historical data is also necessary to allow accurate interpretation of the physical features of the city landscape. Archaeologists and other material culture specialists are finding elements of the built environment are rarely if ever socially neutral (Schlereth 1989, 1997: 13-14; McKee, Hood, and Macpherson 1992). Primary source material from the local context allows understanding legal, economic, and social frameworks that structured how the built environment was used, and sheds lights on efforts to charge seemingly neutral materials with race-creating symbolism. For example, often accompanying the efforts of some whites to effect dislocation project efforts were new city ordinances regulating how people might use space: forbidding use of carrying poles, the tool frequently used by Chinese Californians working in door-to-door produce vending or laundry delivery service to enable carrying a heavy basket to one’s front and rear; enacting an ordinance specifying how much “cubic air” must be available in a room; and drawing around Chinatowns fire limits that called for rebuilding (Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969; Chow 1974). While ostensibly these were neutral regulations, ones applying equally to all Californians, in implementation they often worked as attempts to create and serve as symbols of divisions among residents, being enforced predominantly among Chinese Californians and seldom, if ever, among whites. Primary source research will also indicate whether these actions to influence the physical landscape as people experienced it were given further charge by whites working to attempt formations of racial boundaries. Knowing Holt, a leading Riverside newspaper editor, spent column space denouncing “Chinamen lovers” (Riverside Press and Horticulturalist, 31 August 1884, quoted in Lawton 1987a: 44), for example, draws our attention to the publicly-broadcast discourse intent on drawing and patrolling a color line, and provides context for studying actions that either supported such discourse or acted against it. As archaeologist Greenwood (1993: 380) indicates, rather than the historical study coming at the end of an archaeological investigation, that contextual information should be integrated in the research early on, enabling it to contribute to generating research questions oriented to the local historic environment, and inform interpretations of particular materials.

Incorporating relevant specialists from the beginning

Scholars in ethnic studies and Asian Americanists for more than thirty years have been developing robust, data-rich studies, such as research on historical configurations of identity in the United States (e.g. Chinn, Lai and Choy 1969; I. Chang 2003; Lai 2004), that can assist the formulation of research questions most significant in a particular context. When archaeologists investigated San Jose’s Woolen Mills Chinatown (e.g. R. Allen et al. 2002; Baxter and R. Allen 2002) they not only drew on Asian Americanist historian Yu’s previous historical research (2001), but incorporated her as a consultant in the archaeological work. Such scholars should be incorporated as collaborators in not only the interpretation, but also in the research design. Compliance archaeology decision-makers in particular may want to note that while a number of cultural resource management archaeologists note they can draw on the knowledge and experience of Chinese American historians, their actual practice often is to contract with that specialist after fieldwork is over, when it comes time to produce the final report. By that time, the opportunity for that scholar to provide needed input on the research design is lost, and significant data may have been destroyed. Pyburn (2003: 173-174) elaborates further on how a “we-have-to-get-all-the-artifacts-first mentality” can actually work to the detriment of the archaeological resource.

Building the necessary context: Areal excavations, geomorphological data, and crossmends

Archaeological and other historical examples in this dissertation have demonstrated that contextual data is crucial for effective analysis. This has methodological imperatives not only for how materials are analyzed, but also how excavations are conducted and the types of observations are made about the archaeological deposits during fieldwork. Analyzing materials recovered from archaeological deposits in reference to the deposit from which they were recovered is a chief method for avoiding making unwarranted generalizations, such as creating assumed characteristics of generalized “Chinese” or “white” identities and behaviors. Archaeologist Greenwood (1993: 383, 389) has noted the need for analysis to proceed in a solid grounding of the geographic and temporal context, and this has particular imperatives for archaeological data collection. As chronological control is essential, during fieldwork, excavation should be conducted using horizontal excavations, also known as areal or block excavations, wherever possible to allow the best chances for recovering data that can elucidate the interrelationships of deposits. (As demonstrated by previous compliance investigations such as the Oakland work reported by Busby (1996) and Hupman and Chavez (1994), sporadic auger testing is an inappropriate discovery method for such sites, being more akin to blindly lofting a dart at a target and hoping for a hit.) Better understanding of the origins of deposits will be aided by more emphasis on observing and recording geomorphological data about a deposit, data able to contribute to understanding the processes by which a deposit was created. Identifying soil layers is only one step in this process; descriptions should include data that can allow visualization of the layer and reveal its deposition. Recording observations about soil composition and texture; types, relative abundance, and distribution of inclusions in a stratum or layer; and types of boundaries between strata or layers will be aided by reference to standardized soil science charts such as those available in Reed, Bailey, and Onokpise (2000) and Bullock et al. (1985) (see also Naruta, MacDonald, and Radewagen 2000; Voss, Naruta, and Ramsay 1999). Geomorphological data is frequently crucial in developing the temporal context of a deposit. This is clearly seen in an example from a pit excavated in Sacramento (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 62). There, the absence of clay lamination, which would ordinarily be expected to be associated with water-borne deposits, allowed determining that the contents of the pit had been deposited within a year.

In making the most basic characterizations of sampled archaeological deposits, a compliance archaeology project’s preliminary analysis of artifacts at a minimum must include analysis that can reveal the relationships between deposits. It is therefore necessary to analyze recovered ceramic fragments through the stage of determining the minimum numbers of vessels (MNI, for minimum number of individuals) that may be represented. With the sherds labeled, the recovered assemblages can be checked to see if pieces from different deposits fit together. Such crossmends often allow developing the chronological context of deposits even when it was unable to be provided by indications from the soil. Examples such as the dating of features 4 and 5 in Sacramento’s early excavations (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 62) demonstrate analysis through determining MNI counts and crossmends is minimally required for basic reporting on excavated deposits.

Finally, I mention another most basic aspect of fieldwork because in compliance archaeology settings it is frequently neglected. The methods used for screening excavated soil greatly determine the extent to which potential artifacts are recovered. This can have great implications on whether data that is “unique” and “significant” under legal protections can be retrieved. For example, in the early excavation of Sacramento, archaeologists found wet-screening with 1/16th-inch mesh retrieved small faunal and floral remains that "produced some of the [study’s] most viable data,” allowing study of undocumented aspects of California’s early fisheries and people’s diets (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 167, 74). Their results indicate deposits should at least be sampled with 1/16th-inch mesh wet screening before choosing a wider mesh such as 1/8th-inch (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 50).

Oral histories and public involvement

Archaeologists have also been finding an important source of data in oral histories of study subjects’ neighbors and descendants. In compliance settings, oral histories have been shown to be able to contribute essential information on contemporary practices and events (e.g. Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2004: 9-10, 1982: 167). Additionally, oral histories collected before and during can help guide formulation of significant research questions and interpret emerging data.

A similar recognition for the need for archaeologists to collaborate with non-archaeologists comes in the domain of public involvement (Derry and Malloy 2003). Archaeologists have long held that public interest in excavations should be encouraged (e.g. Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1982: 167), and a number of the major compliance excavations discussed in this dissertation hosted site visits and invited community volunteers’ assistance in processing and analyzing artifacts. Public involvement has intersected with ethics, where professionals have been working to make archaeological practices accountable to the communities biologically or culturally affiliated with the archaeological remains under study (Wylie 1998; Lightfoot 1995: 210; Derry 1998, 2003; Pyburn 2003). Further, in compliance archaeology, it’s being found that meeting legal requirements for adequate treatment of potentially unique and significant archaeological remains requires public involvement (e.g. LSA Associates, Inc. 2003, 2004; Naruta 2003, 2004a, 2005, 2005a, 2005d; Oakland City Council 2004; Pastron and Vanderslice 2005a, 2005b). Without community members involved in early decision-making about cultural resource evaluation and treatment, information essential to understanding a site is often missed, and unique cultural resources can be forever lost.

Conclusion

In the nineteenth century, some individuals and groups worked to create a definition of whiteness that would aid their claims to being entitled to land, mineral wealth, and other natural resources. They worked to create whiteness through contrast to ascribed characteristics of other groups, creating stereotyped racial categories that had legal, economic, and social consequences. These acts constituted racial formation processes, or a racial formation project (Omi and Winant 1986). Noting how stereotypes often extended to available histories, this study looks to contribute to understanding the impact of past stereotypes on current interpretative work. Comparison of a prevalent explanation of how racial polarization arose and increased in the United States, the “ Irish Laborer Hypothesis,” with primary source evidence shows it to be unsupported by evidence, instead forming an example of the enduring influence past representations can have on current understandings.

This study forms part of the anthropological work to rehistoricize racial categories, and develop methods for understanding racial formation processes. It provides an example of work in historical-processual paradigm called for by Pauketat 2001: 87), by adopting analytical methods that recognize how processes such as the creation of social identity take place through everyday practice. That these practices are shaped by local, historical particulars means such research requires data-rich historical study, and I approach these requirements from multiple scales. Reexaming traditionally accepted historiography about the Chinese Exclusion movements in comparison with primary source evidence reveals the long-accepted attribution of anti-Chinese racism as driven by Irish immigrants is misleading, and displaces attention from productive lines of research. Considering the Irish Laborer Hypothesis in the context of English and Anglo-American anti-Irish racism raises the question of whether the attribution anti-Chinese agitation as the primary domain of Irish immigrants may have been a representation that drew heavily on available Anglo stereotypes of Irish as belligerent, combative, and incapable of practicing a successful work ethic, the classic “Stage Irish” trope I discuss in Chapter 1. Primary source research with contemporary newspaper reports, individual actors’ archived manuscript collections and published statements provides one means of looking at the actual actions taken to create and promote anti-Chinese racism.

The spatial arrangement of cities provides another important line of data. Researching the circumstances surrounding the changing locations of historic Chinatowns shows acts contributing to a racial formation project: white individuals who stood to profit from the redevelopment of a Chinatown’s land lobbied for dislocating people through claiming that Chinese Americans were inherently a “nuisance” and a “blight,” and therefore dislocating a Chinatown was for the “public good.” Such insights contribute to a fuller understanding of the ways in which individuals acted to create and promote racial formation and the creation of hierarchized difference as part of their strategies for pursuing profit and political power.

An emphasis on examining historicized practices further focuses analytical attention on the geographic and temporal contexts of the data observed. To understand the extent of the current archaeological sample of California’s historic Chinatowns, this dissertation reviews major archaeological projects at historic Chinatowns of Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Riverside. Comparing the historical development of each of the Chinatowns shows the repeated occurrence of the practice of mainstream white political and business leaders working to dislocate established Chinatowns for their own profit, through asserting arguments about an alleged undesirability of “the Chinese race.” Archaeological projects at these historic Chinatown sites have uncovered substantial material evidence enlarging our understanding of lived experiences in California’s early pluralistic and globally interconnected society. I review the projects and their results with a focus on the site’s historic and geomorphologic context, research methods used, and temporal and geographical context of the sampled deposits. This approach provides an understanding of the previous record of archaeological results at Chinatown sites that shows that previous archaeological work has investigated only a very small sample of the historic Chinatowns, both geographically and temporally. I hope this assessment allows two results. First, emphasizing the specific dates and intra-site associations of the recovered deposits emphasizes the deposits must be evaluated in terms of those contexts and the practices by which they were produced. Such contextual interpretation provides a means for research that avoids replicating the historical legacies of essentializing, viewing people’s actions in a particular time and place a reflection of a reified idea about their identity. Second, providing specific information on the small size of the current archaeological sample assists those regulatory officials who, working in a compliance environment, are charged with making decisions about the treatment of potential archaeological remains based on the California Environmental Quality Act’s criteria of a resource being “unique” and having the potential to provide significant information not available by other means.

The above issues in archaeological approaches to historiography, the creation of social identities, historic spatial organizations, and public participation came into play during the City Planning process for a new redevelopment project on the site of Oakland’s rediscovered San Pablo Avenue Chinatown. Chapter 4’s data and review of the record of previous cultural resource management excavations represent some of the on-the-ground activities of Bay Area communities concerned with activating the legal protections California law currently provides for archaeological and other cultural resources (Jeung 2004). A public review process of the compliance archaeology sensitivity study and treatment plan for the San Pablo Avenue Chinatown produced information that allowed an improved research design, and it is hoped future projects can build on and enhance procedures for public review of and input into such compliance work (Naruta 2005e).

Finally, discussing the anthropological concepts of acculturation studies and ethnic boundary maintenance, emphasizes the difference between their original formulations and how they have been applied in archaeological practices. Analyzing how the implementation of acculturation studies in archaeology of historic sites associated with Chinese Americans has frequently drawn on the historical associations between acculturation, assimilation, and essentialist conceptions of culture emphasizes the utility of approaches that examine the actual creations of social identity through acts of daily practice. This study contributes to the work in a re-historicized anthropology and archaeology with an empirically-grounded investigation of social identity formation processes, including the conditions under which racism tends to be given widespread sanction. Archaeologists have made significant accomplishments in the archaeology of the experiences of Chinese Californians in the pluralistic society they were creating with their fellow Californians. With researchers finding intact archaeological remains in many sites thought to have been destroyed (e.g. Greenwood 1996: 3, 66, 138), Chinese American archaeology is a field just beginning.